Expansion appears to be the name of the game right now in the world of online car retailers.

This week, Carvana has launched in its fourth South Carolina market and its 80th overall. Meanwhile, online vehicle store Joydrive has expanded into Oklahoma through a partnership with the Jim Glover Auto Family.

Starting with Carvana, the company said Wednesday it has added Myrtle Beach to its market roster.

“We first launched in South Carolina just over a year ago, and in that short period of time, they’ve shown us they welcome our new way to buy a car,” Carvana founder and chief executive Ernie Garcia said in a news release. “We’re looking forward to being welcomed in the same way in Myrtle Beach.”

As part of this move, Carvana is lending a hand in Hurricane Florence relief efforts, collecting non-perishable food times from South Carolina customers and bringing the donations to the Harvest Hope Food Bank, with whom the company has partnered.  

Monetary donations can be made at donate.harvesthope.org.

Carvana launched in New York City and Tulsa, Okla., last month. 

Joydrive lands another dealer partner

Speaking of Tulsa, that is where Joydrive is headed.

The Jim Glover Auto Family — which includes a Chevrolet store and a Chrysler/Jeep/Dodge/Ram and Fiat store in the Tulsa  — said it will provide its customers a way to buy online through the Joydrive marketplace, which has partnerships throughout the U.S. with more than 50 dealerships.

“Jim Glover is Oklahoma's family-first dealership, and we take pride in how we treat our customers,” Jared Glover, the group’s vice president, said in a news release.

“Customers increasingly want either part or all of their purchase done online, and we are excited to announce that through our partnership with Joydrive we can make their lives a little bit easier and their car purchase more enjoyable,” he said.

Just last week, Joydrive announced the addtion of two New York dealerships to its platform. 

Earlier this year, Auto Remarketing caught up with Joydrive chief executive Hunter Gorham, a former Ally executive, to learn more about the company

As to why Joydrive chose to involve dealerships in the online sales process — whereas some models in the space do not — Gorham pointed to his 14 years at Ally, which included time helping lead the company’s digital program with some of the larger digital players.

He said the, “lightbulb went off for me after working firsthand with these digitals. I saw the incredible customer response to buying a vehicle online, but I also saw the challenges and eventual collapse of some of them, where they owned their own inventory and were trying to cut out the dealer.

“So, bottom line, it became clear that embracing the right dealers, instead of fighting them, this would enable us — what we viewed as a better model — to provide customers an easy, digital car-buying experience completely online,” Gorham said.

Shift to rev up expansion via Lithia investment

These new markets for Carvana and Joydrive follow a major move by Shift last month to ramp up its scalability. The online auto marketplace landed a $140 million round of Series D funding, led by the Lithia Motors dealership group, which contributed $54 million.

“I think when we look at $140 million of injection of capital, it's really there for one purpose. And that's to scale the organization as rapidly as they can,” Lithia CEO Bryan DeBoer said in a call with investment analysts following the announcement.

“And I think their team has been poised for this and are really just sitting there with dry powder, ready to go.” 

As to where, exactly, Shift goes next in terms of geographic expansion, that wasn’t specified.

But, when looking at the markets Shift is eyeing for expansion and comparing those to the markets in which Lithia operates, “there were about 30 to 40 matches,” where Lithia could quickly offer the storage and reconditioning services Shift needs, DeBoer said.  

Spread out on a U.S. map, those market matches represent “more frown belt than smile belt,” DeBoer said.