‘I’ll have a set of your finest…ditchfinders’ – Online tyre sales in a pre-sale research world

During my regular routine of social media maintenance, I came across the following post on the @Tyrepress Twitter feed from Fast Ford, Mini Magazine and Total BMW editor, Daniel Bevis: “I defy you to find a more wretched tyre than a 7-year-old Luckyland Happygalop.” Now, to make it clear, Bevis was very much stating his personal, subjective opinion both in relation to that particularly floridly-named brand’s quality and in his specific choice of adjectives. However, since he raised that especially vocal opinion, there are at least two broader points to be made. Firstly, consumers have never been more empowered to research their purchases pre-sale and then air their views relating to tyres. And secondly, the ongoing proliferation of brands in the market makes the ability to discern quality and understand each brand’s provenance as important as ever.

On the subject of pre-sale research, here at Tyres & Accessories we have long been highlighting the fact that anywhere between 60 and 80 per cent of consumers look up what they are going to purchase before they buy. And that often means dropping the name of a tyre into Google and reading what comes up. Many of the leading tyre retailers are investing significant sums of money into pay-per-click advertising every month in order to reach consumers at that stage. And when I say significant sums, pay-per-click budgets reportedly run into six figures at some of the biggest tyre e-tailers. Of course, they do that in order draw consumers into their web shops. However, with the vast majority of tyre shops unable to access those kinds of budgets, combined with the reality that many leading national tyre retailers also rely on independent garages to actually fit tyres, the firms that win the business are also shutting out fitters when it comes to influencing tyre sales. Furthermore, most web shops do little to no product comparison. And when they do, it is often based on quite strategically- and methodologically-flawed consumer review information as opposed to objective data and professional testing.

To be specific, if consumers provide product feedback at the point of sale, they can’t know anything about a tyre’s performance. If they do so three months later, the point at which one of the leading players conducts the research that forms the basis of its in-house recommendation and review system, consumers have no point of comparison. Even the most experienced test drivers will tell you that it is basically impossible to make valid tyre comparisons without both products in front of you. Even if that were possible, repeated TyreSafe tread depth data shows that the average driver simply isn’t aware enough of whether their tyres are bald, let alone capable of offering meaningful feedback when it comes to curved aquaplaning performance. Were the average tyre qualified to review tyre performance (and it would take a coincidence of epically mythical proportions), then Joe “Lewis Hamilton” Public would be comparing the end-of-life tyre they took off three months ago, with a brand-new tyre. And so, they would most likely be comparing a worn-out three-year-old product with a full-tread, latest-generation tyre. In other words, they would be comparing apples and oranges.

Without the inclination or ability to properly assess tyre performance, such sites can only propagate marketing fluff or consumer axe-grinding. That’s what happened in the case of the “Luckyland Happygalop” where obviously experienced drivers took to social media to label that specific Chinese-produced tyre with a string of uncharitable epithets. Of course, no one walks into a garage and says “I’ll have a set of your finest…ditchfinders”, as one commenter succinctly put it. And yet the very same websites dominating the virtual tyre marketplace are clearly selling significant volumes of inauspicious and in some cases poor-performing tyres. In other words, large parts of the tyre trade are being shut out of the online retail space while those in positions of power are propagating an environment that still sells on the basis of price and fails to compare on the basis of product performance.

Meanwhile, the number of brands in the market continues to grow. At the last count, our Tyrepedia database – the system that drives our unique consumer-facing product comparison site WhatTyre – tracked 300,000 stock-keeping-units from north of 700 brands. From a business-to-business perspective, this means it is now more important than ever that garages are equipped to know where a tyre comes from, who makes it and how it performs.

Perhaps that’s why Tyrepress and WhatTyre experienced record monthly traffic during March 2023. Despite being less than four years old, WhatTyre recorded more than 156,000 pageviews in March alone. Meanwhile, our Tyrepress B2B news and analysis portal smashed through its previous high of 170,000 pageviews, recording 208,000 pageviews during March 2023. Together, the two sites recorded traffic of some 364,000 pageviews in a single month, which means – at this rate – the sites are now capable reaching 1 million consumer and trade pageviews a quarter and as much as 4 million pageviews a year as we continue to offer tyre and market information that helps garages and consumers alike stay on track and avoid the ditches.