GroupWe: Redefining New Car Buying in India

GroupWe: Redefining New Car Buying in India

In India buying a new car is not just a decision, it’s an event! It’s a milestone, usually marking a person’s first major investment. But as rosy as this experience sounds, the reality is often a hassling journey for most customers.

Why Is Buying a New Car So Hard?

The concept and process of buying a new car in India has remained largely unchanged for the past 50+ years, and customers are expected to buy cars the old-fashioned way.

The process involves a heavy search cost, time, and patience. One is expected to visit multiple car dealerships, drive almost 20 – 30 kilometres between outlets – then start a painful process of bargaining with salesmen, with no clarity on what’s the best discount on the car you. Furthermore, there’s a lack of transparency on stock availability.

As for new car finance a customer typically enquires at multiple banks for the lowest rate of interest, which is a highly time-consuming process.

Similarly for new car insurance, a dealership may be offering insurance at an inflated price, therefore a customer typically checks with multiple insurance providers and websites for the most affordable insurance.

Beyond this, there’s obviously quite a lot of complicated paperwork which seems rather overwhelming for most people. The average new car customer spends an average of 75 – 90 days in this arduous journey.

The Ideation

If these experiences sound familiar to you, don’t worry – we’ve been there, done that! In fact, that’s how Saiyam Pabreja (Co-Founder & CEO, GroupWe) came up with an idea that would eventually take shape as GroupWe.

Back in February 2020, Saiyam and his family were in the market looking to buy a new car, wherein they realised the lack of transparency of pricing and availability at different dealerships.

He called and visited 4 – 5 dealerships, across Delhi-NCR, to check for 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.

The Solution

With a vision to eliminate all these above-mentioned pain points, GroupWe emerges as a new-age car buying platform – that brings you the comfort and convenience of car buying online, at the comfort of your home!

“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!” elaborates Vivasvaan Srivastava (Co-Founder & CBO, GroupWe).

In addition to convenience, GroupWe’s flagship USP is ‘Grouping’ – group deals and bulk discounts to avail the best price on your new car.

“We leverage the power of economies of scale to obtain higher-than-market discounts for our customers.

We ‘group’ customers together in weekly ‘grouping cycles’, thereby getting them up to 30% higher discounts on their new car.” states Saiyam.

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.

Revolutionise New Car Buying – Why Now?

One of the major behavioural impacts COVID-19 made on young, urban Indian consumers was build an immense appetite for buying goods and services online.

Urban consumers, especially millennials, are now more comfortable with online transactions, payment gateways and trusting online services.

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.

“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.”

A dream purchase like a new car deserves to be done with peace of mind. With end-to-end solutions like GroupWe, hassles involved in the car buying process will be a thing of the past and online car-buying will soon become the norm.

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