Stocking up with household bargains this week for the annual Amazon Prime Day sale? This year, Chicago-area shoppers can throw a discounted SUV in their cart as well.
Amazon Autos rolled out in December 2024 in 48 markets including Chicago, with Hyundai as its inaugural partner. Since then, it has grown to 130 markets, added Kia, Subaru, Stellantis and GM brands, and allowed participating dealers to sell both new and used cars online.
For Prime Day, Amazon is also offering a $1,500 gift card with every car sold through Friday.
While the platform is still mostly flying under the radar — a hard-to-find tab on the Amazon website — the online retail giant is looking to build up inventory from local dealerships across the country and eventually make cars as easy to buy as paper towels, toilet paper and detergent.
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“We started this initiative because we had so many customer anecdotes of wanting a more transparent, no-haggle, convenient and trusted automotive purchase experience,” said Fan Jin, director and general manager of Amazon Autos.
Chicago-area car dealers aren’t quite ready to put away their giant tube men beckoning customers to their showrooms, but Amazon Autos is showing some signs of gaining traction.
When Schaumburg Kia moved into a new 45,000-square-foot facility this spring, owner Rohrman Auto Group marked the occasion with a grand opening celebration that included Chicago sports stars, dancing robots and a lightshow.
Rohrman Auto Group has also quietly staked its turf on the potentially bigger virtual showroom of Amazon Autos.
Last year, Amazon Autos recruited the dealership group to list its inventory online, enabling customers to virtually kick the tires, finance and buy with the click of a button. Rohrman, which has 20 dealerships in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, joined the platform in February.
“Every one of our dealerships is on Amazon,” said Ryan Rohrman, CEO of the family-owned dealership group started by his late grandfather, campy TV pitchman Bob Rohrman. “So it’s very similar to when you go and buy a toothbrush.”
Unlike most Amazon products, a new car won’t be delivered to your door from the back of a van. But Amazon is hoping to make the rest of the car-buying process a lot easier than driving around to showrooms and bargaining with salespeople.
Amazon Autos features offerings from local dealers, all of which are available on their lots in real time. The online price — including taxes and fees — is the price you pay, with a number of financing options available. Customers can navigate nearly the entire process from their computer.
“They’re able to essentially complete those very cognitively intense parts of the steps of the car-buying journey, all from the comfort of their home without having to go into a dealer,” Jin said.
There’s still room for a test drive and finalizing the purchase at the dealership. Buyers can walk away if they don’t like what they see. But Jin said customers are generally driving away happy.
Amazon does not take a cut of the car sales and it is initially waiving a fixed monthly subscription fee for dealers as the platform scales up. Down the road, Amazon sees bigger money coming from the dealers themselves as they compete to sell cars online.
“We expect to make our money here with dealer advertising,” Jin said.
Early efforts have been focused on Los Angeles, Dallas and Houston. The Chicago market has more than 40 dealerships on the platform, including several Rohrman locations, and is still building its inventory before Amazon begins promoting it more aggressively.
“Chicago’s on our sort of roadmap for a bigger push later this year,” Jin said. “We found through operating with dealers for the past year that this is really a local business. And so we’ve been taking a city-by-city approach.”
With little promotion, Rohrman’s dealership group has sold 16 cars across its 20 rooftops since going live on Amazon Autos. More than half of the deals were completed this month.
The nationwide sales incentive in connection with Amazon Prime Day — which offers a $1,500 gift card with every car sold through Friday — may be helping.More Top Picks Best Cordless Leaf Blowers
The auto promotion began June 2 and ends on the final day of the annual sitewide summer sale for Prime members.
The Chicago landing page for Amazon Autos features about 2,000 new and used vehicles within 50 miles. Dealerships associated with inaugural partner Hyundai still dominate the offerings.
In addition to Schaumburg Kia and Gurnee Hyundai from Rohrman’s group, other participating Chicago-area dealers include Gregory Hyundai in Highland Park, Patrick Hyundai in Schaumburg and Castle Hyundai of Downers Grove.
Greg Mauro, owner of Gregory Hyundai and three other north suburban dealerships, said sales on the Amazon platform have been stuck in neutral since he signed on at the program’s inception.
“We started out doing one to two a month and it’s very sporadic now,” Mauro said. “It’s less than 1% of our volume.”
Despite generally positive feedback from buyers, building up enough inventory in each market to reach critical mass takes time, Jin said.
The rollout has been slowed somewhat by the process of onboarding local dealerships, which remain the sellers of record. Beyond convincing them to participate, getting individual sales systems to mesh with Amazon can be a challenge, Jin said.
“It takes quite a bit of work to onboard a dealer and all their systems to support end-to-end ecommerce,” Jin said. “It starts with real-time inventory, getting dealers used to pricing on a different platform.”
While Amazon has a number of lenders on its platform, integrating manufacturer financing programs has also slowed dealer onboarding, she said.
For Rohrman, whose family business made its name in the Chicago area with his late grandfather’s low–budget TV commercials, listing his autos on Amazon may be the sales pitch of the future.
“It’s just another avenue for people that want a really frictionless, no-human-interaction car-buying experience,” Rohrman said. “You can do it now through Amazon.”