SpinCar is a digital engagement platform that has continued to help automotive retailers turn prospective shoppers into buyers and loyal customers. Thanks to its useful and intuitive digital retailing solutions – like background removal, 360-degree videos, etc. However, if you’re looking for digital retailing and merchandising solutions for your dealership. It’s best to consider the alternatives as well. You might save a lot of money or get more personalized services!
In this blog, we will take a look at its products and services, along with its alternatives in the market. By following it, you can easily brainstorm, research, and list out digital engagement platforms for your car dealership.
What is SpinCar?
SpinCar (rebranded as Impel in 2022) is an advanced digital engagement platform that offers its services to dealerships, OEMs, and marketplaces operating in the automobile industry. The company offers multichannel solutions using shopper behavioural data and AI technology. It is largely known for its 360-degree vehicle display services – 360° Walkarounds – along with AI communication tools and car photography solutions. Plenty of retailers prefer it because the company has multiple digital solutions available under the same umbrella, which makes integration easy.
In the automobile market, 360-degree car images and videos are currently in trend. They ease consumer research by offering a detailed view of the vehicles from every angle, with touchable hotspots that mark every noticeable detail (like dents and damages on used cars). This helps your brand build trust with the customers and improves their likelihood of purchasing a car from your dealership.
What is the Journey of Spincar to Rename Impel?
Their journey begins in 2011 to create an engaging online automotive shopping experience for their digital clients and dealers. Their primary product was the 360-degree walkaround. Which allowed potential customers to explore the vehicle’s interior and exterior from all angles virtually. However, they extended from their central product and brought various solutions like personalized customer interactions, tools for lead generation, and even post-sale F&I automation.
A well-known brand decided to change its name. SpinCar announces name changed to Impel in March 2022. The reason for changing their name was that the old name was limited to their central product. Whereas, the name doesn’t reflect the rest services they were providing to the automotive online buyers and dealers. Renaming Spincar is now Impel signifies that the company is pushing its boundaries and innovating itself to provide the best for its clients.
What Services Does SpinCar Offer?
It offers a wide range of services like 360-degree walkarounds – commonly known as 360 spin car views – along with Feature tours, Video tours, Image cloning, Background removal, F&I advantage (finance and insurance merchandising), damage tagging, and communication AI tools. The company also offers a photoshoot app for smartphones.
Their services are divided into merchandising, imaging, and communication domains, all of which harness the power of AI. They offer custom solutions as well as solutions as per business type. It effectively manage customer interactions, sales processes, and marketing campaigns. Be it specialty vehicle dealers, local auto dealers, and dealership groups.
What are the Advantages of SpinCar?
It is an end-to-end digital engagement platform that enables car retailers to deliver better experiences via their online retail channels. 360-degree vehicle display services /360° Walkarounds, along with AI communication tools and car photography solutions. Their solutions comprise educating shoppers on the dealership website to engage the target audience, converting leads, and post-purchase service appointments. Basically, you get pre-sales, sales, and post-sales solutions at the same place, saving you time that would’ve been spent looking for these solutions independently.
What are the Disadvantages of SpinCar?
As per customer reviews over time, there have been reports of certain disadvantages. The smartphone application has a few issues, like requiring a SpinCar login every time you minimize and reopen the app. This can be frustrating, as you may have to do it multiple times while shooting different vehicles.
Moreover, some have complained about the limited photoshoot and editing features, which don’t allow dealerships to do much for their VDPs.
Best Alternatives to SpinCar
Impel might be a great match for some dealerships, but it’s best to explore all available options. So here are some alternatives to it, for your online car retail business:
1. Spyne
Spyne has garnered quite the hype with its virtual car studio and 360 spin car video services. You can bid goodbye to costly studio rentals as the smartphone app allows you to capture car images anywhere, remove backgrounds and make it look real with their virtual car studio feature. You get instant photo editing with AI, which helps elevate the customer experience on your website, resulting in up to 40% higher clicks!
With Spyne, you get an AI-guided car photoshoot feature on the easy-to-use app, which helps you capture every angle of the car like a professional. You can also edit the images automatically and instantly with the power of Artificial Intelligence. It is the fastest way to list cars online with minimum manual dependency.
What’s more? Spyne enables used car sellers to engage viewers and convert them into buyers with immersive 360-degree spin videos. With the app, shooting 360 spin car pictures and videos is extremely easy; Just follow the on-screen instructions, and the output will be amazing.
With Car Custom Backgrounds for your car images/videos, you won’t need to break the bank and go the extra mile to get an appealing website and VDPs. Spyne is all you need to elevate your dealership’s digital presence.
2. InstaVid360
InstaVid360 is the world’s first mobile application that combines custom branded video creation with the interactive 360-degree interior and exterior SpinCar integration. Their app supports German, English, French, Italian, and Chinese. With expertise in working for digital direct marketing, CRM services, and database management for around two decades, the company has helped motor retail dealerships across Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.
3. AutoUpLink Tech
AutoUpLink Tech is a turn-key merchandising platform, which makes it different from other solutions, i.e., third-party software to import and export car inventory data. It collects and aggregates your inventory data, videos, and images in near-real time. Then, using their proprietary signatory software, they export your data and media to your DMS/inventory management system. They have over 800 of their integration partners, including DealerTrack, AutoSoft, RCI, and CDK.
4. Evox Images
Evox Images has a gigantic library of stock images of consumer production vehicles in the U.S., and they claim consistency in providing the ultimate automotive image solutions. Their image database apparently dates back to the model year 2000, with 30 to 60 high-quality still images of every model.
Evox Images provides the highest possible resolution for interior and exterior car photography with best-in-class techniques. They also provide three key angles of each car in every color available from the manufacturer, beginning from the model year 2000. However, they only have a stock image gallery, suitable only for new car dealerships, not used car retailers despise from SpinCar.
5. Octopus tools
Octopus tools offer high-quality image retouching services and a next-gen automotive imagery software solution suite. They have an app for car photography, named Piranha, which allows you to shoot and submit images, and then receive highly professional, consistent results within 24 hours.
The Piranha app was primarily designed to make car photography as intuitive and simple as possible and to provide wider access to users using smartphones. The app dictates to the photographer how many photos are to be taken and which views are to be chosen, to help shoot cars at the perfect angles.
Moreover, it checks in real-time whether the photos are suitable for further processing and requests you to reshoot if it isn’t.
6. Cardata.us
CarData is an automotive inventory photography expert in tune with the current climate of automotive inventory merchandising, especially image and image optimization. They provide image optimization solutions – like photo clipping and branding – to help you get your pictures in front of customers at the right time!
Their services also include 360 car photography, along with pre and post-detail car photography.
7. LES automotive
Live Event Stream Automotive (LES automotive) is the largest dealer video inventory provider. Their video solutions are a privately held streaming media service. The company claims to have over 85,000 vehicle video views on their dealer’s internet platforms daily. Platforms like YouTube, the dealer’s website, Facebook, AutoTrader, etc.
8. Flick Fusion
Flick Fusion’s Nucleus is a powerful video marketing platform in the automotive industry. With Nucleus, the power of video marketing, video communication, and merchandising are fused into one easy-to-use video solution, customized to fit the dealership’s need or be turn-key.
The nucleus is designed to improve the video marketing strategy of dealerships. It includes automated stitched videos, live video walkarounds, interactive SpinCar 360, video texting, email, testimonial videos, and live video communication.
9. DealerSync
DealerSync is a platform for automotive dealership marketing and management, responsive websites, lead mining, SEO and marketing tools, and inventory updates. Their 360-degree spin car solution includes exterior and interior spins as well as hotspots.
This allows customers to experience a virtual car viewing experience and call attention to automobile highlights using interactive touchpoints with features like video, image, or text.
DealerSync’s 360 spin player seamlessly integrates with the vehicle details page to render an interactive experience. You can also create placeholder content for vehicles that have not been added to the inventory.
Their guided gallery tool will help you perfectly align every picture for professional car images.
10. Remove.bg
With remove.bg, you can easily remove the background from a car’s photograph and replace it with a luxury garage, natural scenery, or a neutral wall unlike SpinCar. You can also add your branding or logo for the classifieds.
Remove.bg’s AI-powered cutouts allow dealerships to post their ads quickly and make their car photos look much more professional and visually appealing. It also offers automatic shadow addition, to add realism to the picture.
Regardless of the system you work on, remove.bg’s API integrates the automated background removal process directly into your workflow.
11. Fotor
Fotor is a powerful, globally accessible, and user-friendly online photo editing suite. It leverages AI technology to create aesthetically pleasing results.
Fotor’s online photo editor is packed with various tools to help perfect your photos, such as retouching portraits, photo enhancement, and Car Background Removal for your dealership, and effect application. The company also has an app that offers powerful editing services on iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac.
12. Motorcut
Motorcut has two popular car photography solutions – Half Cut and Full Cut. Half-cut removes unsightly backgrounds from automobiles and replaces them with branded, beautiful images representing your business across online platforms.
Full cut, on the other hand, goes a step further. Therefore, It replaces unflattering backgrounds as well as the original floor with virtual options.
13. Virtual car 360 (VC360)
Virtual car 360, also known as the VC360, offers a background replacement service that allows you to shoot in any location and environment. The VC360 app will automatically change the background visible in the photo.
You can choose from their wide range of pre-set backgrounds or even order a personalized backdrop to make your published photos aesthetically appealing.
14. Glo3D
Glo3D provides an affordable 360 car photography app that assists automotive dealers with digital merchandising. No need for fancy cameras; a smartphone is enough to create interactive virtual tours and professional video tours of your car in under 5 minutes!
Glo3D also offers custom backgrounds and personalized banners. With AI, Glo3D automatically generates videos and virtual vehicle tours for your social media and online inventory listing.
15. CarCutter
CarCutter’s app is great for shooting car images and 360 videos, and it also offers Car Background Replacement for both media formats. Their API solution makes background removal and editing quick and easy!
CarCutter also offers image enlargement. If you have low-resolution images in your gallery, this solution will prove to be extremely handy.
Conclusion
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again; visuals are everything for car dealerships today. Whereas, it is not about what you wish to show your potential customers. However, about what your target audience wants to see.
High-quality car videos and images help provide a certain sense of trustworthiness and security to potential buyers. They can see the car inside and out using these visuals. Creating a virtual experience that is informative as well as immersive requires expertise. Something that only experts in the merchandising industry can provide.
With these alternatives SpinCar to Impel. You can look for and finalize what suits your dealership and also connect with your audience better, increasing sales and boosting engagement.
