QR Codes on the Forecourt: Selling to the Customer Who Comes at 9pm

Every dealer knows the pattern: someone walks the forecourt on a Sunday, or after work with the showroom dark. They are genuinely interested, they have time, and they are relieved nobody is there. By Monday they have forgotten which one it was.

That customer is unreachable by any staffed process, and they are the reason a code on the windscreen is worth more here than in most retail.

The window card is the whole play

A code on each vehicle, to that vehicle's listing: photos, full specification, service history, finance calculator, and a way to ask a question.

What it changes is not the browsing — it is what survives it. A phone that has opened the listing has the car in its history, and often in a tab that is still open the next morning. Without that, the visit leaves nothing behind but a vague memory of a blue estate.

Practicalities that decide whether it works:

• Size for the glass, not the sheet. Read from about a metre, through a window, standing outside — around 6–8 cm. Codes designed on screen come out too small on the forecourt more often than any other placement.
• Matte, and mind the glare. A glossy card behind glass, under a low sun or a floodlight, reflects straight into the camera. This is the single most common reason a forecourt code fails.
• Print the stock number and a short address underneath. Then the customer who will not scan can still write it down, and the one who scans and loses the tab can find it again.
• Say what is behind it. "Scan for photos, history and finance" outperforms a bare square, because on a forecourt a bare square looks like an inventory tag.

Why it has to be dynamic

Stock turns. The car sells, the card comes out of the window, and the code goes on the next one — or the listing moves when the website is rebuilt, which happens to dealers more often than most.

With a dynamic code, retiring a sold car is an edit: point it at the equivalent stock, or at the page for the model, rather than leaving a customer at a dead link on a vehicle that is no longer there. A static code printed with the listing URL is one sale away from being rubbish.

It also means the cards are reusable. Print a set with a code each, and reassign them as stock moves.

What the numbers actually tell a sales manager

One code per vehicle, and the scan counts become a record of interest that no other system on the forecourt captures.

• Which cars get stopped at — including the ones nobody enquired about, which is the interesting half. A car with thirty scans and no calls has a price problem or a photo problem, not an interest problem.
• When people visit. Scans clustered after closing and on Sundays are the size of the audience your staffed hours never see.
• Whether the position on the lot matters. The same model at the front and at the back, scanned at different rates, answers a question managers usually argue about.

Each scan records the time, which code, the device type, the operating system and browser, the referrer if there is one, and a salted hash of the IP address. No identity and no location — so it tells you a car was looked at, never by whom.

The rest of the dealership

• Service reception. A code to the booking page and the price list; another on the courtesy car with its instructions, which is where most of the "how does this work" calls come from.
• Workshop. A code on equipment to its procedure. Not customer-facing, and one of the highest-value placements in the building.
• Handover pack. A code to the model's tutorial videos — pairing a phone, the infotainment, the driver aids. It replaces a conversation the customer will not remember and reduces the calls that follow it.
• Number plate surrounds and sold-car stickers. A code to a review page. The best moment to ask is the week after handover, and the car is with them.
• Trade-in valuations. A code on a mailer to the valuation form, one code per campaign so you can tell which mailing worked.

What not to do

• Do not put customer or deal information behind a printed code. A code on a windscreen is public; anyone can scan it, including the competitor from down the road.
• Do not use one code for the whole stock. It saves ten minutes and destroys the only useful thing the numbers could have told you.
• Do not leave sold cars pointing at dead pages. This is the most common complaint about forecourt codes and it is entirely avoidable.
• Do not skip the test scan. Print one, put it in a real window, and scan it at dusk and at midday. Glass and low sun are a harder test than any office.

Quick answers

• What size on a windscreen card? About 6–8 cm — it is read from a metre away, through glass.
• Why does it fail in bright light? Glare on gloss behind glass. Use matte and check at dusk.
• One code per car or one for the lot? Per car. That is where the useful data is.
• What happens when the car sells? Repoint the code at similar stock — with a dynamic code that is an edit, not a reprint.
• Can I see who scanned? No. Time, device and browser only — no identity, no location.
• Is it worth it for a small lot? The after-hours visitor exists at any size, and that is the customer this reaches.