Transparent Pricing, Dealer Success, and the Future of Vehicle Retail

Recently, I had the chance to sit down with Max Materne and Daniel French on the Dealer Lab podcast (powered by OWNEX). What started with a few questionable echo-related puns quickly turned into a wide-ranging and genuinely thoughtful discussion about the future of vehicle retail.

We covered a lot of ground, including:

• What it actually means to be the “Shopify for dealerships”
• Why selling vehicles end-to-end online is as much an operational unlock as it is an incremental sales lever
• How Ekho can be used in-store to increase deal throughput, automate manual process, and improve the buyer experience
• How buyer behavior is evolving, but not uniformly
• Why dealer workflows are incredibly variable, and why software has to reflect that reality
• And how incentives, margin placement, and OEM dynamics quietly shape the customer experience

You can watch the full podcast here.

But the part of the conversation that stuck with me most was a more philosophical one:

What would it take for our industry to move toward transparent pricing, whilst maintaining dealer success, and is that even realistic?

At Ekho, one of the most important things we’ve learned is that what buyers want and what dealers need are sometimes at odds. That tension is what makes building the next-generation vehicle commerce platform both fascinating and challenging. You’re not just optimizing for conversion; you’re navigating decades of incentive structures, margin realities, regulatory complexity, and human behavior on both sides of the transaction.

This post is an attempt to share our perspective on where the industry is today, why it looks the way it does, and how we think dealers, OEMs, and technology platforms like Ekho can move forward together.

Where the dealer world is today on transparent pricing

The reality today is not binary. We don’t live in a world where everyone wants transparent, no-negotiation pricing — and we also don’t live in a world where everyone wants the traditional in-store buying experience.

Instead, we see a spectrum of buyer behavior:

• A growing segment of buyers wants transparent pricing. They don’t want to negotiate. They don’t want surprises. They want to know what the vehicle costs, what the taxes and fees are, what financing looks like, and then make a decision. They’re used to ordering things on Amazon in a few minutes from their couch at home and having the product show up two days later.
• Many of these buyers are comfortable purchasing fully online (we see it happen everyday), sometimes even sight unseen, as long as the experience is clear, compliant, and trustworthy.
• Others still want to come into the dealership, test ride or test drive, and ask questions, but they don’t want to haggle. They want an honest conversation about specs, options, and tradeoffs, and then a clean path to purchase.
• At the same time, there remains a meaningful portion of the buyer population — often older, more experienced, or simply accustomed to how this industry works (that expects negotiation) and recognizes the opportunity of a vehicle being one of the few purchases where the price is subject to negotiation. These buyers shop multiple dealers, leverage quotes, and want to walk away feeling like they got some kind of deal.

All of those buyers exist today. None of them are wrong.

The mistake the industry, and specifically outsiders, sometimes makes is assuming we must pick one and alienate the other.

At Ekho, we’ve been deliberate about supporting both. Our platform enables self-serve, end-to-end online checkout for buyers who want speed and transparency — while also supporting in-store, negotiated deals, where the system automates paperwork, compliance, and back-office complexity so that dealers can grow the store without growing headcount. Different buyers. Same infrastructure.

Why transparent pricing isn’t the norm today, and why blaming dealers misses the point

It’s easy for outsiders to criticize the parts of the buying process that seem unorthodox in today’s largely friction-free commerce world, that frustrate some consumers: lack of transparency, negotiation fatigue, and deal packing in the F&I box. But it’s wrong (and unproductive) to antagonize dealers for this.

There are structural reasons why transparent pricing isn’t universal today.

1. Buyer expectations still drive negotiation

As mentioned above, a meaningful segment of buyers still expects to negotiate. Many come into the dealership primed for it. Dealers don’t invent this dynamic; they respond to it. If buyers are shopping stores against one another and anchoring on discounts, dealers are forced to participate in that game.

2. Margin placement and inventory pressure matter

Today, margins at the dealership often don’t primarily reside in the base vehicle sale. Between OEM inventory programs, floorplan financing, inventory stuffing, and consequent interest rate pressure, many dealers are carrying meaningful inventory risk.

As a result, dealers frequently rely on high-margin F&I products, accessories, and backend components to make deals pencil. That pressure doesn’t come from greed; it comes from economics.

In an ideal future (discussed in detail below) OEMs move away from a model where success is defined by pushing large volumes of inventory off their balance sheets at singular moments in the year. More thoughtful, data-driven wholesale procurement, informed by real demand signals, would reduce inventory stuffing, floorplan stress, and the downstream pressure to extract margin elsewhere in the deal.

3. Incentives shape behavior

Compensation structures matter. Today, sales compensation is often tied to gross margin per deal rather than just unit volume. F&I compensation is similarly tied to penetration and PRU (Profit per Retail unit).

That creates a system optimized for short-term margin maximization rather than long-term customer value. When incentives reward squeezing more margin into a single transaction, that’s exactly what people will do, especially when your compensation is tied almost entirely to margin accrued on the deals you close.

The unintended consequence is a degraded customer experience, lower trust, and reduced lifetime value. Buyers who feel burned are less likely to return for accessories, parts, service, or future purchases — even though lifetime customer value can easily reach the hundreds of thousands of dollars, enabled by a single purchase.

What would it take to reach transparent pricing and successful dealers?

Getting to a healthier equilibrium requires change on both the OEM and dealer sides, and it doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing.

OEMs: move away from the “vehicle futures” game

It’s important to acknowledge up front that this is a big ask.

OEMs are large, complex organizations with deeply entrenched planning cycles, capital structures, manufacturing constraints, and reporting expectations. Shifting how inventory is forecasted, produced, and allocated is not a minor operational tweak; it’s a fundamental transformation of how risk is managed across the value chain.

That said, the current system deserves scrutiny.

Today, many OEMs effectively ask dealers to play a kind of vehicle futures game at annual dealer meetings. Dealers are asked to place large, forward-looking orders based on imperfect demand forecasts, often months before the actual consumer signal becomes available. The incentive to comply is clear: miss the order window, and you risk missing out on hot models or favorable allocation later in the year.

From the OEM’s perspective, this achieves a short-term objective: inventory comes off the balance sheet early, production is locked in, and revenue visibility improves. But in practice, this approach doesn’t eliminate risk; it redistributes and delays it.

Dealers take on the burden of carrying inventory, financing it through floorplan providers, and absorbing the volatility of demand, interest rates, and regional market shifts. As time passes, pressure builds: floorplan costs accrue, aging units become more expensive, and incentives shift toward moving metal, sometimes at the expense of margin discipline and customer experience.

In this system, a disproportionate amount of value ultimately accrues to floorplan finance companies. Interest expense compounds over time, effectively taxing inefficiencies in inventory across the network. What could have been margin retained by dealers — or reinvested into staff, facilities, and customer experience — instead becomes the premium paid for transferring and managing risk.

In other words, the system optimizes for balance sheet optics early in the year, not for total value creation across the ecosystem. It delays the inevitable reconciliation between supply and actual demand, and charges everyone handsomely along the way.

A better model doesn’t remove OEM accountability or dealer entrepreneurship. It reallocates risk more intelligently.

That model would include:

• More frequent demand check-ins, informed by real sales data rather than annual snapshots
• Smaller, more responsive wholesale allocations that adjust to market signal over time
• Less inventory risk pushed downstream by default, especially in volatile rate environments
• Lower aggregate floorplan exposure, reducing the structural pressure to “pack” deals

When dealers aren’t operating under constant inventory and financing pressure, behavior changes. The need to aggressively extract margin from every transaction diminishes. Pricing can be more consistent. Incentives can be realigned. And the customer experience improves as a byproduct and not as a tradeoff.

Transforming this model will take time, courage, and coordination. But it’s one of the most meaningful levers available if the industry truly wants transparent pricing, healthier dealer economics, and a more sustainable future for vehicle retail.

Dealers: align incentives with lifetime value, not just deal margin

On the dealer side, the opportunity for change is both more immediate and less intimidating than it’s often made out to be.

Unlike OEM-level transformation, which requires coordination across massive organizations and multi-year planning cycles, many of the most impactful shifts at the dealership level are entirely within a dealer’s control today. They don’t require new franchise agreements, new brands, or radical operational overhauls. They require a thoughtful reexamination of incentives and a willingness to optimize for lifetime value rather than just the next deal.

The starting point is measurement.

One of the most straightforward and powerful steps a dealership can take is to collect NPS or CSAT after every completed purchase. Not as a vanity metric, and not buried in a system no one looks at, but as a signal that actually matters.

The questions can be straightforward:

• Would you recommend this dealership to a friend?
• Did you feel like you got a fair deal?
• How satisfied were you with the overall purchase experience?

Critically, those scores should influence compensation.

This doesn’t mean eliminating commissions or ignoring sales performance. Volume still matters. Selling vehicles still matters. But incentives don’t need to be so narrowly scoped to per-deal margin extraction.

Balanced compensation models, where part of a salesperson’s or F&I manager’s incentives are tied to customer satisfaction, and part are tied to store-level outcomes, change behavior in subtle but powerful ways. When the win condition shifts from “maximize this deal” to “help the dealership win over time,” collaboration improves, pressure decreases, and trust with customers increases.

Importantly, this is not a theoretical argument. In our data (and increasingly in our dealer conversations) we see that customers who report a positive, fair purchase experience are significantly more likely to return for:

• Accessories and upgrades
• Scheduled and unscheduled service
• Future vehicle purchases
• Referrals to friends and family

This is also where fixed operations come into focus. In the automotive industry, especially, the majority of dealership profits come from service, parts, and accessories — not from unit sales. New vehicle sales are the entry point to lifetime value, not the finish line. Yet too often, friction at the point of sale undermines everything that follows. A buyer who feels pressured, misled, or exhausted by the purchase process is far less likely to come back, even if the service department is excellent.

The shift we’re describing doesn’t require abandoning traditional retail or ignoring market realities. It requires recognizing that short-term margin optimization can actively destroy long-term value.

And while this kind of change can feel daunting, in practice it often comes down to a handful of operational decisions:

• Measure the experience consistently
• Let that measurement matter
• Balance individual incentives with shared outcomes
• Invest deliberately in post-sale follow-up and fixed ops engagement

These are changes dealers can make today, even in the absence of OEM reform.

At Ekho, we’re particularly excited about this area because we’re already seeing early results. In the coming months, we’ll be sharing case studies from dealers who have applied these principles (aligning incentives with experience, leaning into follow-up, and using automation to remove friction) and have seen meaningful improvements in repeat business, service revenue, and overall profitability.

How Ekho fits into this, now and in the future

Ekho’s role is not to force a philosophical position onto dealers. Our role is to give dealers the leverage they need.

Today, our Ekho Dealer platform allows dealers to operate exactly how they choose, while removing the friction that hurts both conversion and margins.

• In negotiated deals, Ekho automates the paperwork, compliance, tax, title, registration, financing workflows, and signatures (the parts no one enjoys and that slow deals down).
• Our online, self-serve channel gives dealers a low-risk way to experiment with transparent pricing without disrupting in-store operations.
• Inventory can be configured unit by unit: online-enabled with full checkout and an honored price, or showroom-only where the site simply captures and enriches leads.

That control matters. It lets dealers choose when and where transparency applies (especially for hot inventory) while still benefiting from a modern, compliant digital front door.

Over time, as buyer behavior evolves and incentive structures shift, platforms like Ekho become the connective tissue that makes change possible without sacrificing dealer success.

The future of vehicle retail doesn’t require choosing between transparency and profitability. It requires aligning incentives, respecting operational reality, and building systems flexible enough to support both.

That’s the work we’re focused on, and we’re just getting started.