TLDR
Carsales announced plans to let buyers configure and order a new car directly on its site, with no launch date set and dealers retaining the sale. Alongside that, it launched Iggy, an AI query tool inside its Ignition ad platform drawing on 16 million member profiles and 3 billion automotive shopping signals per quarter. Only 23% of owners plan to stay with their brand, the lowest carsales has recorded.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
What carsales announced
At its Open House event in Sydney on 14 October 2026, carsales told OEMs, dealers and agencies it is working toward letting new-car buyers configure a vehicle and place an order without leaving the site.[1] Buyers would move through research, test-drive booking and ordering at their own pace, with links connecting them to retailers throughout. No launch date was given.
The same event saw carsales launch Iggy, an artificial intelligence query layer sitting inside its Ignition self-serve advertising platform, carsales' self-serve advertising and campaign management tool.[2] Iggy lets marketers type plain-language questions against that data and get answers without pulling a report manually.
How the ordering channel would work
Carsales describes the proposed channel as giving consumers choice in how far they want to take the purchase on the platform, from researching to enquiring to booking a test drive to placing an order.[1] Ollie Nugent, Head of Consumer Product at carsales, said the intent is to let buyers decide how much of the purchase they want to complete on the platform, with retailers connected at every step.
Dealers retain the sale under the model as described, but the platform would sit between a buyer's declared intent and the moment money is committed. Carsales claims it would be the only platform able to take a car consumer through the whole purchase process to a confirmed sale, with financial commitment reachable within a few clicks.[2] Whether dealers accept a carsales-owned layer between them and the buyer relationship is the real test, given that arrangement concentrates transaction data on the platform rather than in the dealership's own customer relationship management system.
Iggy and the data behind it
Iggy draws on more than 16 million logged-in carsales members and vehicle identification number-level inventory and transaction data.[2] The platform also processes 3 billion automotive shopping data points each quarter, which works out to roughly 33 million per day, putting carsales in the same conversation as the retail media networks already trading on transaction-level data in grocery and telco.
Stephen Kyefulumya, General Manager Media Product and Technology at carsales, said: "The industry doesn't have a data problem, it has a connection problem."[2] Iggy is the tool that connects a marketer's plain-language question to the answer sitting in those data points, without requiring the marketer to know how to query a database.
For media buyers placing automotive budgets in Australia, the buying implication is a shift in how the platform asks to be measured. A carsales that can show a line from ad exposure to a configured order can argue for cost-per-transaction pricing rather than cost-per-lead. Whether agencies accept that argument depends on whether the ordering channel actually launches and how closely it integrates with dealer inventory systems.
Why the numbers make the timing matter
Brand loyalty among Australian car owners sits at 23%, the lowest carsales has recorded, meaning only about one in four owners plans to repurchase the same brand.[1] Nicholas Bailly, General Manager of Advertising at carsales, said "consumers are less loyal than we've ever measured."[2]
The competitive context is 79 brands selling cars in Australia right now, with 54 models on sale today that did not exist a year ago.[1] For OEMs spending on automotive media, that environment makes broad-reach buying harder to justify against a platform offering logged-in buyers and their shopping signals. Iggy and the ordering channel together need to produce the transaction-level attribution that retail media has trained clients to expect, and carsales has yet to set a date for proving that out.
SOURCES & CITATIONS
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
When will carsales launch in-site new-car ordering?
What is Iggy and how does it work?
Do dealers keep the customer relationship under the proposed ordering model?
What does the 23% brand loyalty figure mean for automotive marketers?
Xaviery Malinao writes for Prompt the Market on how brands and agencies are adapting to answer engines, drawing on Bushnote's work with clients across search, AI search and content.
