Carvana Sees 50% Web Traffic Decline in March; Down 42% in Q1 While Most Peers Grow

March 2023 auto retailer update

Similarweb’s latest look at the auto industry shows CarGurus led in the share of traffic among car-selling peers for the month of March 2023 (based on a look at eight leading peers) with a 25% share of traffic.

Carvana, the once high-flying car retailer which gained notoriety by introducing car vending machines, has seen its web traffic in freefall for some time, amid speculation that the company could be at risk of bankruptcy. The company is expected to report Q1 earnings on or around April 19.

In terms of web traffic growth, Cars.com, for the fourth consecutive month, saw the most growth on a year-over-year basis (14.5%), followed by Auto Trader and TrueCar with 14% growth, and Kelly Blue Book (kbb.com) with 11% growth. CarGurus saw 10% growth and CarMax 3%, while Carvana was down 50% and Vroom declined 44%.

Other metrics that stood out:

• Given its large drop in web traffic, Carvana lost eight percentage points of traffic share among the peers in this group, and Vroom lost 0.9 percentage points of share.
• CarGurus led in the share of traffic for the month of March with 25% of this peer group, followed by Cars.com with 19% and Auto Trader with 16%.
• Six of the top eight auto retailers saw year-over-year growth, with only Carvana and Vroom seeing declines. On a monthly basis, all eight retailers saw traffic rise from February.

Web traffic growth shows Cars.com performed best, Vroom, and Carvana worst

We watch traffic to these auto retailers as a proxy for overall demand, as many of them sell cars directly online, and in many cases, consumers visit the websites before making in-person visits. The chart below shows the change in web traffic on a year-over-year basis. You can see clearly that Cars.com saw major growth while Vroom and Carvana performed the worst.

Month-over-month growths show March 2023 was seasonally stronger than February

Versus the month of February, you can see that each car retailer saw a seasonal gain in web traffic, with Kelly Blue Book seeing the strongest month-over-month growth (+23%), followed by CarGurus (+14%) and Cars.com (+11%). Vroom performed the worst (+4%), and Carvana was the second worst (+5%).

Share of traffic shows CarGurus leading, with Vroom and Carvana lagging

Of course, while momentum is important, size still matters. The below chart shows the relative market share of each company in the peer group relative to each other (share of traffic). You can see CarGurus leads at 25%, followed by Cars.com at 19%, Auto Trader at 16%, and Kelly Blue Book at 14%. Vroom, now barely registers in this peer group with only a 1.1% share, half what it was a year ago.

Carvana has seen its share of traffic fall to 8% of this peer group, down from 15% a year ago. It’s clear the company is seeing a fundamental drop in demand that is not related to overall auto retailing demand.

Changes in share of traffic show Carvana, and Vroom struggling

Finally, we took a look at shifts in share of traffic year-over-year, and you can see that Carvana (-7.8%) and Vroom (-0.9%) performed terribly, while Cars.com (+2.3%), Car Gurus (+2.1%) and Auto Trader (+1.9%) did the best.

Public companies mentioned in this report include Cars.com (NYSE: CARS), CarGurus (Nasdaq: CARG), CarMax (NYSE: KMX), Carvana (NYSE: CVNA), TrueCar (Nasdaq: TRUE), and Vroom (Nasdaq: VRM).

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Methodology

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