Mobile Payments and Car Buying Get Serious With Walmart / CarSaver Deal

The notion that you can buy a used car from a kiosk, potentially with a mobile payment system, might sound downright ludicrous to anyone who’s shopped for a car lately. Yet it seems to be working, as a pilot program recently launched by CarSaver and Walmart is poised to expand and offer the service to more users.

The original pilot program between the two started back almost two years ago, with a single location in Stuart, Florida. Fast forward to April of last year, and four markets got in on the action: Dallas, Houston, Oklahoma City and Phoenix. Now, the deal is poised to expand once more, and make inroads into several non-Texas-and-proximity states: Virginia, Georgia, Illinois, and Indiana. There will even be a microsite opened on the Walmart website proper, reports note.

CarSaver, for its part, uses a combination of banks, insurance companies, and certified dealers to set up its pricing schemes, a move that has proven beneficial for the standard CarSaver customer. Said customer has saved an average of $3,500 off the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) and around $3,900 on repairs to said cars that are covered by the CarSaver lifetime warranty.

It would be easy to be skeptical here, thanks to the notion of buying a car from a kiosk, sight-unseen and car unsat-in. However, since the partnership effort offers a lifetime warranty, at last report, this sort of removes the biggest problem. What does it matter what shape the car’s actually in when you buy it sight-unseen from a kiosk if it comes with a lifetime warranty? There’s actually a dis-incentive to offer a lemon through such a service because they’ll just end up having to fix it. It makes more sense for CarSaver and Walmart to offer the best up front because there’s less chance of that warranty coming into play.

With that in mind, there’s still a lot of value to seeing a car, sitting in it, and looking for those little things like bubble rust or an interior that actually smells like an ashtray. But Walmart and CarSaver are splitting the difference surprisingly well here, and this may well go wide in short order.