Scion's website least liked in the industry

Scion was meant to be the hot youth brand that would lure first time buyers into the Toyota family. In case you don’t have any young people in your life, they use this internet thingy a lot. In fact, they do stuff like shop on it and use it for entertainment. Some crazy kids even buy cars using it. The bad news for Scion is that those that use the Scion website rank it last of all the automakers studied.

A 2011 study by Polk found that 60 % of all vehicle shopping is done on-line. Polk did that study again in 2013 and found that the time vehicle shoppers spent overall had actually declined, but importantly, the percentage of that now spent on-line shopping for vehicles had increased to 75%. The upshot of this is that your website better hook the buyer quickly and it better be good or you risk having the shopper hop over to another site that they like better.

J.D. Power and Associates have just released their study ranking 33 automotive manufacturer’s sites. Although Toyota and Lexus were right around the average, Scion was last of all on the list. J.D. Powers’ study polled customers about their usage and ranked the automakers’ sites on four categories including information/content, navigation, appearance and speed.

Our look at the site revealed that in order to even enter it one must click closed an advertisement for a Presidents' day sale. The next screen shown is that in the photo above. Perhaps these are good marketing practices, but this web-addict avoids sites that insist on advertisement viewing in order access content. I suspect many others do as well.

Given the younger demographic’s heavy use of on-line information, and given that Scion was invented to capture this web-savvy group, Scion’s last place finish is just more bad news for a brand some are concerned might not survive.

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