[Walt Kustra]

Anybody out there have any suggestions for better live inventory display management? It was a minor problem before cash for clunkers, but now it seems like every other lead is on a vehicle we dont have. What is the best way to keep my new inventory current and who should be doing this? (we use dealer.com) My used inventory has some of the same problems but not as bad. We use Vauto there and from what I understand once reynolds/adp shows a 0 balance the car will be removed. Problem there is by the time that happens it just gets taken off of Vauto and then seems to take a while before its off all of the other sites. What works best for you guys?

[Matt DoCampo]

I manually control our inventory for this reason. That and since most of our used car inventory is on eBay, I need to remove it ASAP once there is a commitment on the car to prevent someone from clicking the BIN button when the car is burning gas.

At the end of the day, I have our sales manager email me the sold stock numbers. I remove them from eBay, archive them from our website. They are auto removed from AutoTrader and cars.com during the overnight data dump.

[umer.autojini]

I would say look at the DMS...something likely is going wrong with the DMS pull. Confirm with dealer.com on how often they are pulling from your DMS... if not daily then get it down to daily...When I do the pulls I check for Status Code of "S" and Balance greater then 0 in RR. Get the DMS update before the update to third parties... otherwise you may run into 2 day delay with third party sites. If you are pushing to CC and ATC do not edit in their admin as that locks the record.

Feed sites i.e (vast, oddle, etc) they run on their own schedule and may not actually update for a week or so.

For sites like Ebay & Craigslist and others it may be a manual process...

[Walt Kustra]

Ok guys sounds good. Now that I have a plan for taking used cars offline in a timely manner, how about managing the new car inventory? Right now we dont have a system in process for updating our website with the most current new car inventory. How can I get the vehicles I have on the site for my customers to get an accurate representation of what I have on the ground. Is it crazy to think that I can keep up with this? Also, while were on the subject of getting cars on and offline how are you guys getting your videos you shoot of vehicles online? For a while we were using some college kids to shoot the walkaround vids then put them in the correct format to upload to our sites. We would like to have video of all of our used cars online at all times. Do you have a dedicated person or team shooting and uploading the videos, or is there a third party you can hire to shoot and upload vids for you? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again.

[Matt DoCampo]

Originally Posted by Walt Kustra

Ok guys sounds good. Now that I have a plan for taking used cars offline in a timely manner, how about managing the new car inventory? Right now we dont have a system in process for updating our website with the most current new car inventory. How can I get the vehicles I have on the site for my customers to get an accurate representation of what I have on the ground. Is it crazy to think that I can keep up with this? Also, while were on the subject of getting cars on and offline how are you guys getting your videos you shoot of vehicles online? For a while we were using some college kids to shoot the walkaround vids then put them in the correct format to upload to our sites. We would like to have video of all of our used cars online at all times. Do you have a dedicated person or team shooting and uploading the videos, or is there a third party you can hire to shoot and upload vids for you? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again.

I shoot all of our photos and will add video once I get the okay to purchase a new camera. I'm too much of a control freak and don't have the patience to deal with waiting for a third party photo boy to show up and shoot pictures of our cars.

[umer.autojini]

New Vehicles... in your DMS have right information... from the car invoice... I get in the Model Code, Exterior Color Code, Interior Color Code and the Options... VIN decoding will take care of all the data points... and this would also end up matching the stock Evox images with the right color... Evox images are available down to the trim level... Note if you are using RR then color code is entered in the Color field... with the "/" delimiter. i.e "SI/Silver".

Most of the online videos are based on still images (w/Ken Burns Effect) and Text to Voice... Dealer.com has an excellent tool for this... also here are two (one, two) great posts on this topic from the blog.

[mattwatson81]

We have inventory management solutions that can help you for new and pre-owned cars.

Your problem might be the slowness of pulling DMS data and getting it updated on your website. We don't use any third parties for DMS integration to minimize these types of problems.

[Jeff Kershner]

Go figure... Matt and VinSolutions has a solution for you.

@Walt, I hope you are getting your live inventory figured out. I have yet to have hear of a 3rd party providing great quality full video walk-arounds. Not sure if this is something I would want to outsource. Guess it depends on how engaging you want the videos to be.

Of course there's always the infamous stitched photos/videos!!

[JoePistell]

walt,

Creating walk-around videos is a pain. If you dont hire it out, Tinker with low budget ideas until you find the right mix that your customers like. I think the hardest part is getting the right spokesman. Not holding that spokesman to perfection is key too (let their personality own the camera).

[Walt Kustra]

Right now it looks like were going to try to hire a dedicated person to do nothing but convert and upload videos that are going to be shot by two other dedicated in house people.