Car dealerships have lagged behind other industries in digitization of the in-store experience. For a luxury brand like BMW, it is important to maintain a brand image as innovators in the automotive space. Such an image is difficult to achieve at the in-store level if their dealers rely on antiquated methods, rather than a digital portal to guide customers through their inventories.

When the vehicle itself is not at hand for demonstration, 21st century customers expect to see beautiful high-definition renderings in digital format, bringing them as close as possible to the real thing.

To meet this need, our team built the Virtual Showroom (VSR), a live, interactive, digital and visual inventory web application which provides real-time inventory information to meet customer demands. The backbone of VSR’s inventory data is a live inventory data feed from BMW itself, providing the most up-to-date information on current dealer stock inventory and status of vehicle orders and vehicles in production.

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VSR also has its own integration of the Build Your Own (BYO) Configurator, allowing dealers to guide customer through the BYO experience. When the customer reaches a configuration they like, they can find and compare inventory matches among stock vehicle within and without the dealership, as well as vehicles in production or on order.  

We also created several features to help dealers customize the management of their inventory. Specific vehicles or configurations can be saved as a favorite in the dealer’s personal garage. Commonly used sets of advanced filters can be also saved and reloaded with a click. Dealers can even come up with their own data points to add on a vehicle-by-vehicle basis with the custom fields feature. These data points are 100% dealer-controlled and have use cases such as lot location, internal status codes, deadlines and more. Our advanced filter can even be applied to these custom fields.

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