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We use Salesforce.com for our business and we use the APIs to extend the  functionality and do custom things. But we spend hundreds of thousands  of dollars a year on our CRM and the staff to maintain and customize it from nothing to something very specific for us.

The difference is the automotive business isn't the type of business where a car dealer themselves will utilize the APIs. Car dealers don't typically have software developers on staff to utilize them. So the integrates are done vendor to vendor and not utilized by the dealership directly. I think this is true for all automotive based CRMs beyond just VinSolutions. On a side note, we actually have a very open platform and we integrate with all of our competitors.

Salesforce.com and other generic CRM products must be highly customizable and rely on their customization and API capabilities to provide a solution for all of their customers across many business verticals.