General Motors Launches On-Board E-Commerce for 1.9 Million Cars
12-6-2017
General Motors announced Tuesday that millions of its model-year 2017 or later cars will become e-commerce enabled through a new in-car platform called Marketplace.
Drivers of Marketplace-enabled cars will be able to prepay for coffee and gas as well as make restaurant reservations and hotel reservations through an interface on-board. Merchants included in the marketplace at launch include Shell, Exxon Mobil, TGI Fridays, Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and Applebee’s, GM said.
The platform – developed in collaboration with IBM – will be uploaded automatically to about 1.9 million vehicles starting immediately, Reuters reported. Four million vehicles across the Chevrolet, Buick, GMC and Cadillac brands will include the platform by the end of 2018, the automaker said.
GM Vice President for Global Connected Customer Experience Santiago Chamorro told reporters at a press briefing that GM will get an undisclosed amount of revenue from merchants featured on its in-dash Marketplace, according to Reuters.
GM is not the first car manufacturer to venture into integrating e-commerce on-board its vehicles. Ford Motor Company has partnered with ETA member Amazon to bring ecommerce to its cars through the Alexa AI system, and Jaguar has partnered with Shell for in-car fuel payments. At ETA’s TRANSACT conference in 2015, Visa debuted a “connected car” capable of ordering pizza through in-car ecommerce.
Watch GM’s announce video here, and see the story originally reported in Reuters here.
About ETA
The Electronic Transactions Association (ETA) is the world’s leading advocacy and trade association for the payments industry. Our members span the breadth of significant payments and fintech companies, from the largest incumbent players to the emerging disruptors in the U.S. and in more than a dozen countries around the world. ETA members make commerce possible by processing approximately $56.75 trillion annually in purchases and P2P payments worldwide and deploying payments innovation to merchants and consumers.
ETAs membership spans the breadth of the payments industry to include independent sales organizations (ISOs), payments networks, financial institutions, transaction processors, mobile payments products and services, payments technologies, and software providers (ISV) and hardware suppliers. For more information, visit electran.org.
