Small Scottish town takes the car buying crown

A small town just outside Glasgow has been crowned as Scotland’s capital of internet car buying.

Visitors to online motor retail specialist BuyaCar.co.uk from Portland, in Dorset – with a population of around 5000 – are more likely than anyone else to purchase a car after visiting the site.

It’s the latest evidence of a trend toward rural dwellers and those outside major cities leading the way in the online car-buying revolution.

Hot spots for online car-buying in Britain range from as far north as the Scottish Highlands and islands all the way down to southern English coastal counties.

Now, analysis of visitor statistics to BuyaCar.co.uk has revealed the 10 places in Britain where browsers most often turn into buyers. They are:

1, Portland, in Dorset; 2, Uddingston, in South Lanarkshire; 3, Seldescombe, in East Sussex; 4, Winnersh, in Berkshire; 5, Ash Vale, in Surrey; 6, Milford, in Surrey; 7, Wantage, in Oxfordshire; 8, Aveley, in Essex; 9, Royston, in South Yorkshire; and 10, Melrose, in the Scottish Borders.

The latest analysis looks at those internet users who are most likely to place an order after browsing BuyaCar.co.uk by calculating the ratio of sales to website visitors.

All 10 of the locations identified in the latest study are outside major cities, confirming BuyaCar.co.uk’s view that the convenience of completing the entire car-buying process – from research to financing and door-to-door delivery – is most appreciated by those who would otherwise need to travel more to visit traditional dealers.

This view is supported by the fact that the average distance BuyaCar.co.uk delivers to a customer’s door is almost 180 miles.

While Portland takes the top slot for commitment to placing an order Seldescombe and Uddingston came second and third with more than four sales for every 100 site visitors.

Austin Collins, managing director of BuyaCar.co.uk, said: ‘In 2018 more than five and a half million different people in the UK visited our site and around one in every 1,100 people who browsed our site bought a car from us.

‘That illustrates just how committed the people in the hotspots we identified really are to buying cars online, ranging from one or two car purchases for every hundred visitors in places like Ash Vale and Wantage to that remarkable one in four figure for Portland.

‘Of course we sell most of our total volume into the big metropolitan areas so it’s easy to overlook the real hotspots for online motor retail, which our analysis reveals.

‘That is where the customer appetite and commitment is actually strongest.’