New Car Offers Guide: Aligning Pricing with Consumer Buying Habits
9 in 10 buyers use finance when buying a new car. Yet, the industry still has room for improvement when it comes to clearly displaying finance options. Consumers want transparency, and showcasing monthly pricing alongside the cash price on adverts can make a real difference.
To bridge this gap, we’re excited to introduce New Car Offers — a powerful addition to our new car package. This functionality allows you to attach finance offers to new cars on Auto Trader, displaying the minimum deposit and monthly price upfront. This not only enhances transparency but also builds consumer confidence by making affordability clearer from the start.
The New Car Offers functionality is only available for customers on our new car package, don’t want to miss out…? Start selling New Cars on Auto Trader today.
How does this help you?
Improve buyer confidence with transparent pricing
By displaying monthly finance costs upfront, you provide greater pricing clarity, helping consumers understand affordability at a glance. With better-informed buyers, leads are more qualified, reducing time wasted on uncertain prospects.
Seamless, Compliant Finance Integration
Advertising car finance can be complex, especially with FCA regulations to consider. With at least 3,500 New Car adverts on Auto Trader confirmed as having misleading pricing, it’s more important than ever to shift from misleading promotions to clear, FCA-compliant finance offers. Our robust, fully compliant solution makes it simple for retailers to input the necessary information and display customisable finance offers on their adverts with ease.
Reduce Friction & Accelerate Sales
A finance offer gives consumers a true understanding of the cost of ownership. 84% of consumers say they value the ability to easily compare cars and offers, so by integrating a single, FCA-compliant finance example, you provide instant clarity—eliminating back-and-forth and helping buyers make faster decisions, so you can sell more cars, quicker.
How does it work?
New Car Offers seamlessly integrates into Portal and Auto Trader Connect, ensuring an intuitive and efficient experience for retailers. The familiar interface allows for a smooth setup, making it easy to start using this functionality right away.
Adding Finance Offers to your New Car Stock
When adding finance offers to new car stock, simply log in to portal as usual and select Finance Offer tab. There is a mixture of required and optional fields which have been included to ensure that the offer advertised is FCA compliant and transparent for the consumer, you’ll need to complete all the required fields to add an offer.
Create your offers
The fields required will change depending on the type of finance the retailer selects. There are three options: HP, CS and PCP. While inputting this information is likely to take a little longer when listing vehicles, it enables the consumer to self-serve the information they need to make a purchase decision - saving time providing finance estimates further down the line.
By displaying a finance offer on your stock, you're giving the consumer a clearer indication of the true cost of buying a vehicle therefore opening your adverts up to a wider, more qualified audience.
Create Templates to save time
To reduce your admin demands, we’ve included a template functionality that is similar to that of the vehicle description template. The template functionality allows you to save a copy of an offer and apply it to as many vehicles as you’d like, allowing you to save valuable time.
Publish your offers
Once you have saved the details of the offer to Portal, the minimum deposit and monthly payments of your stock will appear on the product page. There is also a link to see full details of the offer which shows the full representative offer. This allows the consumer to see the full details of the offer, increasing transparency.
If you use Finance Calculator, it’s worth noting that once your list your new car offers, they will display on the product page rather than the New Car Finance Calculator.
Make sure your stock is seen by the right audience and maximise your sales potential with New Car Offers.
New Car Offers FAQ’s
Got any questions on New Car Offers? Check out our latest help and support articles for more information.
Looking Ahead: Continuous Improvements
We're committed to enhancing the New Car experience for both buyers and retailers, with ongoing improvements to search visibility and advert presentation. As we introduce new car finance offers, we’re also increasing efforts to police non-compliant listings to ensure transparency and accuracy. Misleading adverts, including those incorporating finance into the overall vehicle price, may be removed in accordance with Auto Trader’s terms and conditions. We’ll closely monitor performance data to ensure these updates drive results, and we welcome your feedback—reach out to your account manager to share your thoughts.