In this op-ed Sonia Majkic, co-founder and CEO of 3 Phase Marketing, writes that consumers in Australia are underserved by the quality of websites they have to access. And that pain is no more acute than in the automotive industry.
Fair to say Australians of all ages are confident internet users. 96.2% of Australians are online. With a surge of advances in the last three years, technology has reached a point where people’s website expectations are high. Useful, usable and accessible are most often reported in studies. Transparency is a do or die factor; trust is something that needs to be earned. And there’s something more – a basic tenet of digital marketing. A company’s website “describes” its prestige, credibility and the quality of its products, yet car brands don’t get it.
Analysts have noticed a consistent and costly issue across the car industry – dealership websites that undermine marketing performance rather than support it. Dealers are spending more than ever on digital marketing, yet the website too often becomes the weakest link in the customer journey. One of the most glaring deficits is in websites’ mobile versions. Smartphones are Australians’ dominant devices. Nearly 95-97% of Australians use mobile phones for everyday browsing as of 2025-2026.
And it’s not as if Australians are starved when it comes to car dealer options. Competition is fierce. Buyer scrutiny is ruthless. As of early 2026, more than 67 car brands compete in Australia, the highest number on record. With buyers overwhelmed by choice, dealership websites that lack real-time pricing clarity, inventory visibility, and intuitive user experiences are increasingly being penalised, creating a growing trust deficit across the market.
Many automotive brands continue to build platforms around inventory systems and internal workflows, not how buyers actually research and purchase vehicles. As a result, many dealership websites prioritise internal processes over buyer behaviour, leading to poor performance across speed, usability, and conversion. All critical errors.
Heavy templates, excessive third-party scripts, and limited flexibility contribute to slow load times. While more than 70% of Australian automotive research happens on mobile, conversion rates on mobile remain significantly lower than desktop. Most websites are created for desktop first. That’s fine if the translation to mobile is thoughtful. The issue is often less how they look, many look mobile-friendly. It’s how they function – few are mobile-functional. Critical actions like finance calculators and trade-in valuations are often clunky and difficult to complete on a phone. When buyers hit friction at these moments, they leave and continue their research elsewhere. And even when dealers suspect or even work out that their websites are not working well enough, many have limited control over them. Simple changes most often require development support.
This creates fragmented customer journeys. Buyers are met with generic calls to action regardless of where they are in the decision-making process, along with unclear navigation, inconsistent messaging, and poor guidance on next steps. Trust drops quickly, engagement declines, and conversion suffers.
The automotive buyer has changed, but many dealership websites haven’t. Australians today expect speed, clarity, and ease. When a site feels slow or confusing, trust drops instantly and conversion rarely follows.
The obvious solution is to build automotive websites mobile-first, with a strong focus on speed, usability, and clarity. A flexible content structure lets dealerships create campaign landing pages and respond quickly to market opportunities while maintaining a clear and consistent website journey. In other words, stronger engagement and more reliable conversion outcomes. And design websites to work hand-in-hand with paid media strategies. Messaging, page structure, and calls to action to be aligned with buyer intent. No friction from ad click to conversion, and advertising spend is supported rather than undermined by the website experience.
For dealerships, the complex problems of a brutally competitive market often seem overwhelming. For me, the solution isn’t about adding complexity. It is about removing it.
