South Korean retailer The Hyundai built a digital platform around discovery and entertainment instead of speed and price. The results suggest real appetite for the exact opposite of frictionless e-commerce.
The Hyundai Hi, a new digital platform from South Korean department store The Hyundai, was built on a deliberately contrarian idea: stop optimizing for the fastest path to purchase.
📊 The Results After Nine Weeks
$36 million in gross merchandise value, up 43.5% year-over-year
Visitors up 326% to 9.6 million
Traffic up 315% to 18.5 million clicks
470,000 new members
Instead of product grids and search bars, the platform runs on curated shops, editorial storytelling, and a feature called Gems that lets shoppers save and share personal collections. Cultural tastemakers called Icons post recommendations and original content, including a stylist competition show.
🎙️ Want the full conversation?
Listen to today's Automotive State of the Union episode for the complete discussion, additional context, and the conversations that shaped our perspective.
It's taking a lot of different components and weaving them very intricately together to create an immersive and truly engaging experience that is fun and you want to come back to.
Entertainment, Not Efficiency, Is the Actual Product
The platform connects directly to The Hyundai's physical stores, already known for turning shopping into a cultural event through pop-ups, exhibitions, and food experiences. The digital version is built to recreate that same wandering, discovery-driven feeling on a phone.
Paul and Kyle's Take
The interesting question isn't whether a department store can pull this off. It's who builds the automotive version. Paul's read: third parties, not OEMs directly, are best positioned to do this, automotive influencers, culture content built around specific vehicle types, curated discovery experiences that feel like browsing instead of shopping.
He points to Shopify's Shop app as the closest existing comparison, a mobile-first, social-feeling shopping experience already proving the model works outside of Korea.
Who Actually Builds This for Cars?
No automotive platform has attempted anything like this yet. OEMs already lean into brand content and community to some degree, but nothing close to a discovery-first shopping experience built around entertainment rather than speed.
What This Means for Your Store
Nothing here is directly actionable today, but it's a real signal worth watching. If a third-party platform builds something like this for automotive, inventory browsing, culture content, curated discovery, it could reshape where and how shoppers first encounter your vehicles, long before they ever reach your website or showroom.
