Buying a Car Entirely Online: The Steps That Still Happen in Store
Buying a car entirely online is finished by about 7% of US buyers. Five years of Cox Automotive data on which steps stop, and why.
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The end-to-end car purchase got built. Vendors shipped it, dealers installed it, and buyers say in survey after survey that they want it. Then about seven in a hundred use it, and that share has held for three years. The steps where the flow stops are the same ones every year, and they are countable.
Buying a car entirely online is completed by roughly 7% of US buyers, per Cox Automotive's Car Buyer Journey Study published 13 January 2026. The distance between what buyers say they want and what they finish is widest at the money steps: the credit application, product selection and the price. Each of those turns on proving who someone is and what they earn.
What did the end-to-end promise actually claim?
The claim was that a buyer could complete every step of a vehicle purchase away from the store, at their own pace. Cox Automotive's Future of Digital Retail Study, published 18 October 2017 from 2,550 in-market shoppers, found 83% of consumers preferred to complete at least one purchase activity online, and 84% still wanted help from dealership staff.
Read those two numbers together and the original research was more careful than the slogan that followed it. Most buyers wanted some of it online. Almost all still wanted a person involved.
The store had a real problem to solve. Cox Automotive's 2018 Car Buyer Journey Study, published 21 March 2018, found the typical buyer spent over three hours in the dealership, nearly 40 minutes of it idle, and 64% felt the financing and paperwork took longer than expected. Nobody invented that complaint, and the capacity to answer it got built. Cox Automotive's Digitization of Automotive Retail Study of 25 June 2025 found nearly half of franchise dealers now offer a fully online purchase, double the share two years earlier.
How many people finish buying a car entirely online?
About 7%, and the figure has been flat across three consecutive years of the same study. Cox Automotive's Car Buyer Journey Study published 17 January 2024 found 7% of 2023 buyers completed 100% of the steps online, against 50% who completed every step in person. The study published 13 January 2026 found 7% again, with 53% entirely in person.
Fully online completion is a genuine business at genuine scale, and still a thin slice of the market. Carvana reported 596,641 retail units sold in full-year 2025 in results published 18 February 2026, against the 16.2 million new light vehicles NADA reported for 2025 on 31 December 2025, before used volume is counted. What moved instead is the blend: Cox Automotive's January 2026 study found 63% of buyers agree the ideal experience combines online and in-person activities. The stated destination was never the pure ecommerce case.
Which steps show the widest gap between what buyers want and what they finish?
Financing steps carry the widest gaps, and product selection carries the widest of all. Cox Automotive's January 2026 study found 48% of buyers wanted to apply for credit online while 33% did, 37% wanted to finalise the price online while 19% did, and 40% wanted to select F&I products online while 16% did.
Table 1: what US car buyers say they prefer to do online against what they actually completed online, step by step, across five years of Cox Automotive research. Every figure is drawn from Cox Automotive's published releases, and where a year's release did not publish a preference figure for a step, the cell says so rather than borrowing from an adjacent year.
| Step | Say they want it online | Actually completed it online | Cox Automotive study, publication date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Credit application | 96% willing to apply online | 29% | Car Buyer Financing Journey Study, 26 April 2022 |
| Credit application | not published | 30% | Car Buyer Journey Study, 18 January 2023 |
| Credit application | 48% | 33% | Car Buyer Journey Study, 13 January 2026 |
| Signing the paperwork | not published | 12% | Car Buyer Journey Study, 18 January 2023 |
| Finalising the price | 37% | 19% | Car Buyer Journey Study, 13 January 2026 |
| Selecting F&I products | 40% | 16% | Car Buyer Journey Study, 13 January 2026 |
| Every step of the purchase | 21% called it their ideal | 7% | Car Buyer Journey Study, 17 January 2024 |
| Every step of the purchase | 63% say a blend is ideal | 7% | Car Buyer Journey Study, 13 January 2026 |
The credit application row is the interesting one. Cox Automotive's Car Buyer Financing Journey Study, published 26 April 2022 from 3,050 financed buyers, found 29% had applied for financing online while 96% said they were willing to. Four years later, completion sits at 33%. Willingness was never the constraint.
Why do identity and income resist being done remotely?
Both steps ask a stranger to prove something about themselves through a phone camera, and the phone is a worse instrument than the desk it replaced. A finance manager holding a licence and a pay stub is doing something a remote flow has to reconstruct from photographs, and the reconstruction fails often enough to show up in the funnel.
Identity failures concentrate at image capture rather than at the buyer's willingness, and that evidence sits in why abandonment spikes at the identity step. Income is the harder half. A photographed pay stub is a picture of an assertion, and confirming it needs a payroll or banking connection the applicant has to consent to and finish. Point Predictive, a fraud analytics vendor, put income and employment misrepresentation at 45% of a record $10.4 billion in annual auto lending fraud exposure on 8 April 2026.
A third difficulty gets less attention. The vehicle has to be inspected, appraised and handed over, and a trade-in valued from photographs may be valued again when someone opens the door.
Does starting the purchase online shorten the visit?
It does, and the savings are measured. Cox Automotive's study published 7 January 2025 found buyers who completed key steps online saved an average of 42 minutes at the dealership, rising to 49 minutes for new-vehicle buyers. Its April 2022 financing study put the saving at 30 minutes for applying online and 38 for signing paperwork online.
The same research names the leak. Cox Automotive's Digitization of Automotive Retail Study of 25 June 2025 found 83% of dealers acknowledge customers often repeat steps in-store because of inconsistent online data, and 62% of dealers run multiple retailing tools at once. A buyer who types their income at home and again at the desk did the work twice, and the second time is the one that counted. The rebuilt version of that hour is in rebuilding the F&I hour.
What does Canada publish about this?
Canada publishes direction and almost no step-level measurement. DesRosiers Automotive Consultants, reporting for Transport Canada in November 2024, recorded pure online vehicle sales rising from 2.4% in 2019 to 4.1% in 2022, with the hybrid pattern of online contact and in-dealership close rising from 29.7% to 42.0%, and forecast 17.1% fully online by 2030.
Attitudes are measured, completion is not. CADA's Canada's Automotive Retail Evolution Study, published June 2025, found 86% of consumers surveyed still wanted to physically interact with a vehicle before buying. No Canadian source publishes what share finished a credit application online last year.
What would close the gap?
Treat verification as a step in the flow with its own success rate, rather than as a gate bolted to the end of it. The steps that stall repeat across every year of the same study, and they are the steps where a buyer is asked to prove something. Design work there beats another entry point into the same funnel.
Instrumentation comes first, because the industry is arguing about a number nobody publishes. Attempts per applicant, time in step, and the share of buyers reaching a second try would settle in a quarter what five years of preference surveys have not settled.
The stronger opinion is that 7% was always the wrong target. A buyer who does the credit application, the identity check and the income confirmation at home, then drives in to see the car and sign, has bought a car online in every way that matters to the file. Measuring end-to-end completion sets the bar where most buyers never said they wanted it, and a decade of real progress reads as a flat line.
What we couldn't verify
No published source gives a step-level abandonment curve for an online vehicle purchase in either country. The Cox Automotive series measures what buyers report completing after the fact, which is not the same as watching a flow and counting where people leave. We searched Cox Automotive, J.D. Power, NADA, CADA, DesRosiers and Experian.
The preference figures are not measured identically across years. The 96% willingness figure from Cox Automotive's April 2022 financing study and the 48% preference figure from its January 2026 journey study are different questions asked of different samples, so the table reads as a direction rather than a series.
Nothing public measures how often an online trade-in valuation changes after inspection, how often a buyer starts a remote income check and abandons it, or how many finish everything except delivery. That last group is invisible in a statistic counting only 100% completion.
Common questions
What percentage of car buyers buy entirely online?
About 7% of US buyers, per Cox Automotive's Car Buyer Journey Study published 13 January 2026, with 53% completing every step in person. The same share of 7% appeared in the study published 17 January 2024, so fully online completion has been flat for three consecutive years.
Which car buying steps have the biggest online completion gap?
The financing steps. Cox Automotive's January 2026 study found 40% of buyers wanted to select F&I products online while 16% did, 48% wanted to apply for credit online while 33% did, and 37% wanted to finalise the price online while 19% did.
Do buyers actually want to buy a car entirely online?
Most want a blend. Cox Automotive's study published 13 January 2026 found 63% of buyers agree the ideal retail experience combines online and in-person activities. Its January 2024 study found 21% described a fully online purchase as their ideal, against 7% who completed one.
Does completing steps online save time at the dealership?
Yes, by measured amounts. Cox Automotive's study published 7 January 2025 found buyers completing key steps online saved an average of 42 minutes at the dealership, and 49 minutes for new-vehicle buyers. Its April 2022 financing study measured 30 minutes saved by applying for financing online.
Is there Canadian data on online car buying?
Only at the level of direction. DesRosiers Automotive Consultants, reporting for Transport Canada in November 2024, put pure online sales at 4.1% of Canadian sales in 2022, up from 2.4% in 2019. No Canadian source publishes step-level online completion rates for the credit application.
Related reading: the auto finance journey map, starting the application on the buyer's phone.
Carousel builds the verification layer that lets those steps finish before the buyer arrives. See the auto intake suite
