vroom.com – Online Sale of Used Vehicles

The U.S. online seller of used cars Vroom went public at the beginning of June. In their IPO documents, the online store reported that they had more than 5,000 vehicles on offer on their platform in the first quarter of 2020, up from less than 3,000 in Q1 2019. The number of average monthly visitors to the online used car store more than doubled in the same period – from about 411,000 in Q1 2019 to almost one million in Q1 2020. Thinking of COVID-19 and the newly found popularity of contact-less research and purchase of products of all kinds, the time might be ripe for a real disruption in the U.S. used automotive market, which to date is highly fragmented and has a really low eCommerce penetration. Vroom steps into the breach here, offering used vehicles and related services of any price range to customers who these days rather turn to an online store than to their local dealer. The business model is popular – ecommerceDB.com estimates net sales of vroom.com to rise by more than 50% year-on-year in 2020.

In 2016, four years after the online store was launched, vroom.com registered net sales of US$106 million. In only one year, the online used vehicle platform increased its net sales to US$254 million, which corresponds to a year-on-year growth of almost 140%. Since then, the U.S. eCommerce player has continued on its solid growth path, increasing net sales by 19% and 95% year-on-year in 2018 and 2019, respectively. This resulted in 2019 overall net sales of US$588 million – almost six times the amount of 2016. While forecasts for many businesses – also in the eCommerce field – have been corrected downward following the economic catastrophe of the first half of 2020 due to the corona pandemic, Vroom’s business model is likely to benefit from the new corona and post-corona shopping habits. At least, net sales via vroom.com are forecast to grow by another 51% year-on-year in 2020, resulting in overall net sales of US$890 million.