How can I get my vehicles uploaded and on sites like cars.com and autotrader faster?

[Matthew Danskin]

My company primarily sells vehicles direct to other dealers and through Manheim Auctions. Because of this, our window to sell retail is often under a week. By the time the vehicle lands here, gets cleaned up, has photos taken, uploaded to our site through dealer specialties, and pushed to cars.com, autotrader, etc, they are gone. Is there anything I can do to speed up the process?

We currently clean the vehicles and take photos within 2 days. I am wondering about the digital side of the process.

 

[ewalraven]

You would need to work with your inventory provider. There shouldn't be that much of a delay on it. If Dealer Specialties uploads the inventory the same day they take it. Then it should get pushed out to AutoTrader that night. Is that happening? Do you want it done quicker?

With that said, AutoTrader, Cars.com, and others used to accept individual feeds from dealers. Doubt they do this anymore, but it's worth a shot. Also it was my understanding that some inventory providers had an API that would essentially "post" the inventory right away.

 

[ddavis]

It sounds like you are waiting for Dealer Specialties to load the vehicle for you. You can use their backend tool to load the vehicle and have it pushed to AT and Cars.com. You can take a few pictures with a cell phone and the Dealer Specialties pictures will replace them, later.

 

[CarGuy2011]

I use HomeNet Automotive and they have an API to Cars.com and HomeNet has a "special relationship" with ATC, so these are the fastest ways to the websites. For example, I added a car to a dealer's inventory yesterday morning and it was on Cars.com and ATC later that same day without photos. The photos posted overnight and were available in the morning.

Most other data inventory companies at a minimum will be the next day or later the next day, some take longer. Cars.com updates the website for most around 2PM from the overnight data feeds and ATC updates around 9AM.

HomeNet does offer an advantage in it's feeds to a lot of data partners. Dealer.com can be updated by HomeNet within an hour and several website hosting companies use HomeNet as their inventory hosting, which will update even quicker.

A lot has to do with your account rep, when did he/she upload the photos to the company's server, if after the cutoff which will cause an additional delay of another 24 hrs. I would make a note of which cars are photographed and how long they take to get to the websites. If not the next day, there's more things to be addressed.

 

[JamieS]

I know that Dealer Specialties had (maybe still has?) multiple daily feeds to ATC, I think it was every 6 hours. Most of the data feeds from 3rd party vendors go out to your ad sites well after anyone is typically taking photos. Usually between 1am-3am. So unless your rep is taking them overnight you would be fine.

 

[yagoparamo]

Matthew,

The times that takes to get a car online from the data collection system depends MOST OFTEN not on the system's ability to send data but on the 3rd party site so receive and process the data. The sending system just drops a file usually in an FTP server, the true action happens on the receiver by using that file to update the account.

For fast upload and market visibility, if you are in a good traffic Craig's List market, you should use that site. It will allow you to post the cars almost immediately as they are photographed.