Auto sites stall

Most, if not all, of Poland's dozen or so online auto portals will have to close down over the next few years, industry sources said. "Car sales via the Web are minuscule and will stay minuscule," said Wojciech Drzewiecki, president of Samar, which monitors Poland's car market. There have been no direct auto sales over the Internet in Poland. The biggest auto sites gather offers from a number of vehicle makers to help car buyers compare prices and contact dealers for a final purchase. According to Drzewiecki, this will not be enough to cover the operational costs of most of the existing portals. "Auto portals will be a source of information for car buyers but they will purchase their vehicles directly from owners," he said. "Customers will finally select two or three portals and the others will go bust." Mojeauto.pl, Poland's biggest auto portal, has brokered the sale of some 1,500 cars since its launch in June 2000, according to Jacek Lisik, the president of InterNet Service, which runs the portal. The portal acts only as a link between drivers and car dealers, generating revenue from a commission on final transactions, fixed fees from dealers, advertising and providing the car industry with tools for customer relations, Lisik said. Commissions on each sale assisted by Mojeauto.pl vary between 0.5% and 3% of the transaction value and generate slightly more than half of the site's revenue, according to Lisik. But even though the company racked up zł. 1.2 million ($286,000) in turnover last year, the portal's costs amounted to some zł. 200,000 a month. While January was a good month for mojeauto.pl, which secured 159 care sale transactions, Lisik forecasts some 1,000 transactions in the entire year, which, he said, amounts to about half of the online auto referral market. "The Polish market can buy some 2,000 cars annually via the Web today," Lisik said. With such a small market, most existing portals will have to go out of the business, according to Lisik. "There's room for only two auto portals," he said. Dealers' sales not Internet driven Online-assisted sales are still a fraction of Polish dealers' revenue. Carservis, InterNet Service's biggest partner in Warsaw, sold 105 units via mojeauto.pl last year - 3% of the dealership's total sales volume of some 3,500 vehicles, according to Tomasz Gajewski, Carservis's sales manager. But Drzewiecki said online portals provide a new sales channel for dealers, which are looking for new ways to sell cars in Poland's shrinking market. "We have our own Web site, but it can target customers who know us and our Web site, and that's not enough," Carservis's Gajewski said. "It's more likely that people will find us via mojeauto.pl." Jarosław Kocoń, president of Ital-Mot dealership was much more skeptical about the new online sales opportunities. "We only sold about a dozen cars via the Internet last year," he said. While Web enthusiasts were projecting during the Internet bubble in 2000 that drivers would soon begin buying their autos online, no such transaction has been made in Poland so far and Gajewski dismissed the possibility in the foreseeable future. "Poles still have too little confidence in the Internet to buy a car without touching and test driving it before the purchase," he said. Kocoń agreed. "Poles still perceive the purchase of a car as some kind of family celebration," he said.