Case Study: Buckeye Honda approves more borrowers and boosts sales efficiency with Upstart Auto Retail

How Buckeye Honda is approving more borrowers with Upstart

Buckeye Honda in Lancaster, OH faced rapidly shifting shopper behavior as more customers began the car-buying journey online and needed a way to seamlessly connect online leads to the in-store experience. To address this, Buckeye Honda selected Upstart—deploying Upstart Auto Retail along with Online Retail, In‑store Digital Retail and AI‑Powered Financing—to create a simple, intuitive, and unified digital-to-showroom process.

Upstart implemented Upstart Auto Retail and AI‑Powered Financing to streamline data entry, desking, offers and in‑store follow-up, enabling sales teams to adopt the tool within a week and be fully operational within a month. As a result, Buckeye Honda achieved a 76% higher lead-to-close rate (online vehicle sales rose from 83 to 146), a 533% increase in front-end gross, and Upstart was the lowest rate 71% of the time—improving training speed, customer engagement, and profitability.

Buckeye Honda

Scott Thomas

General Manager