GroupWe: Changing the Way New-Age Indians Buy New Cars

• ByStartupStory     |    August 23, 2022

Buying a new car in India is as much an emotional decision as a practical one. Often, it marks a person’s first big investment – the first real step into adulthood, independence and being self-sufficient. However, as exciting as this experience sounds, the reality is that car buying is marred with immense hassles with many ups and downs along the purchase journey – often leaving buyers disgruntled.

Hassles While Buying a New Car

The way Indians have been buying new cars has remained largely unchanged for the last five decades. The process is time-taking, old fashioned and inconvenient. “Customers spend an average of 75-90 days in their new car-buying journey.” remarks Vivasvaan Srivastava (Co-Founder & CBO, GroupWe). “In a tireless search for the best discounts or fastest availability on their favourite cars, most customers lose sight of the immense search cost they incur.” Customers typically visit multiple car dealerships, driving almost 20 – 30 kilometres between outlets – followed by an arduous process of bargaining with salesmen, however with no clarity on what’s the best deal in the market. Furthermore, there’s a lack of transparency on stock availability.
Moreover, most young customers seem clueless about new car finance and insurance options. Customers additionally spend time calling or visiting multiple banks to enquire about the lowest rates of interest. Similarly, for new car insurance, if customers may check with insurance agents or visit multiple websites to research for affordable insurance options.
“Adding up the search cost in this whole journey, customers lose over Rs. 15,000 in monetary terms. Plus, the opportunity cost of time lost is often overlooked.” elaborates Saiyam Pabreja (Co-Founder & CEO, GroupWe). “The final discount most customers end up with after this painful search would be far lesser in value! Some don’t realise, but those who do – wish for a better, hassle-free solution!”

The Ideation

Back in February 2020, Saiyam and his family were in the market looking to buy a new car. Like most customers, their journey was unfortunately marred with inefficiencies and lack of transparency. He called 4-5 dealerships across Delhi – NCR to check for the best discounts. He spent multiple weeks travelling long distances to conclude his research. This proved to be a painful process, and it dawned upon him that it’s physically impossible for most customers to know the availability and best discounts available in the market. What could’ve made this car buying journey a whole lot easier was a one-stop-solution that gave an end-to-end solution throughout the process. This experience eventually paved the concept and vision for GroupWe.

Presenting GroupWe – The Solution

With the intention of adding convenience for the customer, GroupWe is designed to facilitate car buying at the comfort of your home at the mere click of a button. “GroupWe provides an end-to-end car buying journey to customer – starting from car research, to booking your new car online, new car finance, insurance and used car exchange – all one place!” explains Vivasvaan. Apart from convenience, GroupWe’s an added advantage with ‘Grouping’ – group deals and bulk discounts to avail the best price on your new car. “Grouping is our key USP, wherein we leverage the power of economies of scale to obtain higher-than-market discounts for our customers.” states Saiyam. “We club customers together in weekly ‘grouping cycles’, thereby getting them up to 30% higher discounts on their new car.”

GroupWe: Offerings and Features

The first part of the new car buyer’s journey is car research: GroupWe offers customers an advanced interface to compare cars and models across a variety of automobile brands. Unlike OEM platforms GroupWe is a multi-brand platform, thereby allowing customers to make cross-brand comparisons to make informed decisions.
The next step is taking test drives of your shortlisted cars: GroupWe facilitates test drives at home, as per your convenience – thereby helping you save time and drastically bring down your search cost in the process.

Once you’ve shortlisted which car brand and model, the customer then moves to the most exciting part – the ‘grouping cycle’.
The Grouping Algorithm, our in-house mechanism clubs ‘like-minded’ customers together in a weekly cycle. Customers receive quotations at the end of each cycle, with ‘grouping incentives’ – i.e. discounts based on the group size. Our offers dynamically change with respect to the group size each week. The system rewards customers who join a grouping cycle with up to 30% higher discounts.

At the end of the cycle, the group of customers is connected with a partner authorised car dealership offering the highest discounts and fastest availability. Parallel to this, the insurance and car finance processes get underway.

New Car Finance: GroupWe has a tie-up with leading nationalised banks, private banks and private financers to help customers avail new car loans at the lowest rate of interest. GroupWe helps aggregate between the various rates offered by different banks, and helps the customer choose the one which is right for them. Our team additionally helps customers make informed choices by guiding them in matters related to foreclosure, part payment, etc.

New Car Insurance: GroupWe works with all leading insurance providers. The platform allows customers to choose the most affordable insurance, with the add-ons they want. Our insurance prices are significantly cheaper than showroom rates, thereby helping customers avail significant savings on their new car insurance.

Used Car Exchange: GroupWe has a tie-up with several used car channel partners and local dealers to help facilitate used car exchange. We help customers get multiple quotes for their used car, thereby assisting in getting a fair price for their used car.

Once your car has arrived, you have the option of getting the delivered at home or taking the car’s delivery from the showroom. This completes your process of buying your new car in a hassle-free manner, from the comfort of your home with GroupWe!

Beyond Car Buying

The car buying process may be over, but the journey with GroupWe has just started! Over the next 5 years, we offer our GroupWe customers exclusive offers and deals in the form of cash rewards and gift coupons for customer referrals and insurance renewals. Furthermore, customers can continue to avail great offers, through GroupWe, on their car servicing and maintenance.

Why Make Car Buying Online?

The Pandemic has led young, urban Indians to grow increasingly comfortable with availing goods and services online; so much so that a lot of us prefer services that entirely eliminate physical human contact via end-to-end digitisation and do not require us to step out of our homes. Most urban consumers, especially millennials, are also savvy with online transactions and payment gateways.

The new car industry is the next big thing to go digital. The new car-buying process has, for the most part, remained unchanged. GroupWe aims to break away from the traditional, old fashioned way of buying cars from dealerships; and brings this experience online. Through a seamless car buying experience at the click of a button, GroupWe aims to leverage a first-to-market advantage in this space.

“Most online platforms are present in the saturated used car market or car-research segment, as most haven’t cracked the formula of how to get the best deals on a brand-new car.” remarks Vivasvaan, on GroupWe’s competitive edge. “But with our ‘grouping’ mechanism, GroupWe offers a logical concept to avail superior deals on new cars.”

GroupWe works on leveraging the power of economies of scale, with many add-on services and benefits to sweeten the deal for new car customers. Through an extensive network of tie ups across showrooms, banks, insurance providers, used-car exchange channel partners, etc. – GroupWe offers market leading discounts on new cars to customers. Moreover, the vision remains to reduce search cost, and eliminate pain-points in the customer’s journey.

“Our aim is to become the Amazon or Flipkart of car buying in India! In the future, new car brands and models will be launched through GroupWe.” says Saiyam, on the future of car-buying in India. “Just like gadgets are launched exclusively via select platforms today, any new car model or car brand entering India will be launched through GroupWe with exclusive offers.” GroupWe is pushing a change in mindset and enabling people to realise that even car-buying can happen digitally. Up until a few years ago, people never believed you could buy fresh fruits, medicines, clothes or furniture online. But today, that has changed and urban Indians are heavily using online platforms to ease their shopping experiences. The same paradigm shift is around the corner for the automobile industry. With end-to-end solutions like GroupWe, online car-buying will soon become the norm.

An event as momentous as buying your new car shouldn’t come with hassles that completely suck the joy out of the experience. At GroupWe, we’re looking to make the car-buying experience entirely seamless, with every step of the journey unfolding at the click of a button!

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