Bridging the retail gap - What dealers really want from digital retailing

Explore the disconnect between digital retail solutions and dealership operations in this insightful webinar. Join experts Adam Bruttell, Michael Gaiter, and James Hickey as they discuss operational challenges, bottlenecks, and strategies for building dealer-aligned ecosystems that improve sales, customer experiences, and OEM partnerships.

About This Webinar

Digital retail adoption in automotive is accelerating — but a critical misalignment has emerged between the technology being deployed and the day-to-day operational needs of dealerships. Dealers are asking for transparency, seamless integrations, improved pencil-to-delivery workflows, and tools that support their sales process rather than disrupt it. Yet much of the current technology ecosystem adds complexity rather than removing it.

This session, hosted in partnership with Digital Dealer and featuring experts from NETSOL Technologies Americas and Hoover Auto Group, analyses the root causes of the retail gap, examines the operational friction points that automotive digital retail often amplifies, and outlines a roadmap for building dealer-aligned digital retail ecosystems that drive real outcomes for sales teams, customers, and OEM partners.

What Is the Retail Gap?

The retail gap describes the disconnect between what digital retail technology promises and what dealers actually experience in practice. Despite significant investment in digital tools across the industry, many dealerships are running more systems than ever — with less operational clarity, not more.

The core issues driving the gap are:

• Transparency is missing: dealers need clear visibility into deal structures, customer progress, and system handoffs, but most platforms obscure rather than illuminate the process
• Integrations are fragmented: technology stacks are growing but not connecting, creating manual workarounds that slow deals and frustrate sales staff
• Pencil-to-delivery workflows are broken: the journey from initial pencil to final delivery involves too many disconnected steps, too many re-entries of data, and too many opportunities for deals to stall
• Tools disrupt instead of support: sales teams need technology that fits around their process, not technology that forces them to change how they work to accommodate the platform
• Complexity is increasing, not decreasing: the promise of digital retail was simplification; the reality for many dealers has been the opposite.

Key Takeaways for Dealers and OEMs

Three priorities emerged from the session for dealerships and OEM partners evaluating their digital retail strategy:

• Dealer alignment must come before deployment: Technology built without dealer input creates friction at the point of sale; the most successful implementations start with workflow mapping, not feature lists.
• Integration architecture determines outcomes: a platform's value is only realised when it connects cleanly with existing DMS, CRM, and lender systems; seamless integration is not a nice-to-have, it is the foundation
• Staff enablement is the multiplier: the dealerships achieving the best results from digital retail are those investing in ongoing training and process support alongside the technology itself.

How NETSOL Is Closing the Retail Gap

NETSOL's Transcend Retail platform is built specifically to address the misalignment this webinar explores — designed around dealer workflows rather than imposing new ones. With modular architecture, real-time lender integrations, and an omnichannel approach that connects online and in-store seamlessly, Transcend Retail equips dealers to deliver the transparency and simplicity customers expect without disrupting the sales process teams have built.

For a practical example of what this looks like in production, the MINI Anywhere digital retail platform — powered by Transcend Retail — demonstrates how an OEM and dealer network can deploy a fully connected digital retail experience at scale.

Going Deeper — Related Reading

The challenges discussed in this session sit within a broader shift in how dealerships must approach digital transformation. Reinventing auto retail for 2025 covers the specific operational roadblocks OEMs and dealers face and how digital-first strategies are being applied to overcome them. For the full webinar listing and background on this session, Digital Dealer has published the complete webinar details and registration information on their platform.