As the digital age continues to develop, dealers have had to adapt at an ever-quickening pace to satisfy a perpetually evolving consumer base. For used-car customers, Penske Automotive Group announced during their second quarter conference call on Wednesday that one of their main conduits for sales is via their website.

Roger Penske, the group’s chairman and chief executive officer, believes mastering the digital side of the business is key to limiting competition.

“We have looked at our PenskeCars.com, and we have over 60,000 used cars online there, which seems to be generating quite a bit of traffic,” Penske said. “I think that’s working out from an e-commerce perspective.

“On the used car side, we were up $50,” Penske continued, in regards to profit per car. “When you look at it sequentially, there’s no question that we’ve been able to sustain our margins for the last three or four quarters, which I think is key. We don’t have the inter-brand competition on the new and I think with the used, with the execution of the Internet, if a person wants to buy a particular car, and if the process is efficient and we can get that customer in, we don’t have a competitor on that car.”

To contrast, Mike Jackson, the chairman and CEO of AutoNation, while speaking in his own company’s second quarter conference call last week, addressed a long-term but slightly different goal for the group’s online strategy. Though not referring directly to new or used sales, Jackson wants to get to the point where customers who shop for cars online can get all of the financial logistics squared away before ever setting foot into the dealership.

“Informational sites are useful. They’ve taken us to a certain point, but the customers are not interested in doing all of that work, disconnecting, and then coming to the stores and starting all over again,” Jackson said. “The sites need to reach into the store and transact on real inventory, real incoming inventory, with real pricing, with market data that validates that pricing. And the customer, when they see the car they want, at that price they want, are able to send us a deposit and make it their car."

Jackson noted that the company is investing $100 million, over the course of 2014 and 2015, into this effort, aiming at making the AutoNation website transactional by the end of 2014. 

“I think we will have to see how skillful we execute and how the marketplace reaction is, but this was the reason behind why we rebranded the company coast-to-coast. We could not envision doing this with multiple names, we think it’s far more powerful with one name,” Jackson said. “It’s sort of like the Shared Service Center, which took us seven years to fully implement, that gave us both a cost advantage and a performance advantage and, also, in many ways, was a foundational element for this digital undertaking and that we need all the stores on the same technology platform for everything from database management to how we run the company day-to-day.

“It’s certainly not the end of the story over the next two years; there will be many more chapters,” Jackson continued. “But we’re in a very ambitious and exciting phase. I call it an investment phase, that we feel, in our ambitions to build a great company, and a great brand, in the long term, we need to make and hit the right vision for the company and win in the marketplace.”