Is Amazon Getting Into the Used Car Market?

If you enter the make and model of a vehicle into Amazon, what’s likely to come up is a list of accessories for the car or truck in question. What you’re not going to get, though, is a page where you’ll have the option to actually buy a used car. Amazon has made some forays into the automotive world, including a partnership with Hyundai, but it’s largely left the online car sales market to other companies.

You might think that Amazon not expanding into an existing market is a bit out of character for them — especially given the steps they took last year to compete with the likes of Shein and Temu. And it turns out that the company may well be closer to getting into the car sales world than was previously believed.

Writing at Autoblog, Steven Paul explored what might be on the horizon for Amazon in the automotive world. Citing reporting from Automotive News‘ Carly Schaffner, Paul writes that the retailer is planning to build on the work they’ve done selling new Hyundais in order to sell a much wider array of vehicles.

“Our focus is really on dealers and how we serve the whole dealer — all that they want to sell in the way that they want to sell them,” Fan Jin, the Director and General Manager of Amazon Autos, told Automotive News. In that way, at least, this sounds closer to an expansion of the company’s marketplaces, where third-party sellers can sell their wares via Amazon, than the idea of Amazon warehouses suddenly carving out space for cars, trucks and SUVs.

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Jin told Automotive News that Amazon’s foray into used cars would happen “soon.” And while the idea of Amazon as a destination for used cars might have seemed strange a few years ago, Paul points out that the pandemic changed a lot about buying cars — including creating much more demand for an online market for vehicles. Given Amazon’s strategy of trying to sell virtually everything, it’s not a shock to see vehicles enter the picture.