Carvana Says Refinements to eCommerce Model Deliver Record Quarterly Sales

Carvana said Wednesday (July 30) that it achieved record retail unit sales and revenue in the second quarter as it continued to refine its online automotive retail business.

The company’s retail unit sales rose 41% year over year to reach 143,280, while its revenue rose 42% to reach $4.84 billion, according to a Wednesday earnings release.

It achieved this growth during a quarter in which the market grew by less than 5%, Carvana CEO Ernie Garcia said Wednesday during the company’s quarterly earnings call.

Carvana Chief Financial Officer Mark Jenkins said during the call: “Consistent with past quarters, our growth in the second quarter was driven by our three key long-term drivers of growth: a continuously improving customer offering; increasing awareness, understanding and trust; and increasing inventory selection and other benefits of scale.”

Garcia said in a shareholder letter released Wednesday that Carvana continued to enhance its business model during the quarter.

The company now delivers cars to customers 0.7 days faster than it did a year ago, Garcia said. It accomplished this by integrating more facilities from other parts of its business so it can store more cars and keep them closer to customers.

Carvana also now has 23% more sales per customer service advocate than it did last year. It did this by simplifying its eCommerce experience so that customers have less need for support and speak with customer service for less time when they do call in.

The company’s operations expense per retail unit is $150 lower than it was a year ago. Garcia said in the letter that Carvana now delivers cars to customers’ doors, offers integrated financing, handles customer support, manages trade-ins, facilitates customers’ title and registration, and maintain a seven-day return policy for just over $1,200 per sale.

Asked during the call if Carvana had seen any impact from tariffs during the quarter, Garcia said the industry may have seen some pull-forward in sales followed by some slowness, but that the industry’s sales were generally flat.

“I think our goal there was to make sure the machine was just operating in as balanced a way as we possibly could keep it,” Garcia said. “There will be other dynamics and catalysts and little moves quarter to quarter in the future as well, and I think the most important thing that we can do is just try to keep the machine moving forward effectively and build tools that enable us to absorb whatever bumps and make whatever changes we need to, whenever we see them.”