As anyone who has ever spent time editing their new and/or used vehicles can attest, there is nothing a whole lot more time consuming than clicking one by one to add the correct trim, transmission, and vehicle options to each fresh car in inventory. This is a job that I have held for nearly nine years (among a million other tasks) and over this time I have had one large lingering frustration. On new vehicles in particular (in our case Chrysler and Kia), why on earth do the OEM's not allow a VIN specific data feed to be accessed by companies like Chrome (I manage our inventory with HomeNet, who gets their VIN data from Chrome) so that all of our new vehicles automatically populate the correct features (trim, tranny, color, options, etc.)?? This feed does exist, but with I'm told one expection (Subaru), the OEM's up to this point won't allow it to be used. I have no idea why this is....the data is not a secret, since as a Chrysler/Kia dealer I can run each VIN number, see exactly how each vehicle is equipped, and then manually edit each car so it displays online correctly. This process however takes hours and hours of time, time that I instead could use to actually work directly with customers to convince them to buy a Chrysler or Kia product! Wouldn't the OEMs prefer we use our time for that or not have to hire an extra person to do these edits? Or in the case of many dealers I've noticed who don't do the edits at all, wouldn't the OEM's prefer to send this data automatically vs. having incomplete vehicle data online? I simply don't get it and have to imagine there are a lot of you out there who share my frustration. I'd love to put together a petition to the OEM's to plead our case....anyone interested in helping with this??
Vin Explosion Frustration: OEMs, give us the data!
- Thread starter Bryan Barnett
- Start date
- Apr 10, 2009
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- Matt
GM is the only OEM I know of that has this capability. I totally agree this data should be available!
- Apr 7, 2009
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- Joe
Careful what you wish for BB.
This options SNAFU is the reason why the Intenet has not decimated the Used Car Marketplace (like it has with the Travel Industry, the brokerage industry, the music industry, the new car biz, the book industry, or any retail-able item that can be shipped via UPS industry, etc...)
FACT: The flatter and more transparent the product analysis becomes, the thinner the retailers margins will be.
Careful what 'cha wish for... Just a tip from your ol' Uncle Joe.
This options SNAFU is the reason why the Intenet has not decimated the Used Car Marketplace (like it has with the Travel Industry, the brokerage industry, the music industry, the new car biz, the book industry, or any retail-able item that can be shipped via UPS industry, etc...)
FACT: The flatter and more transparent the product analysis becomes, the thinner the retailers margins will be.
Careful what 'cha wish for... Just a tip from your ol' Uncle Joe.
Joe -- not sure I understand why this would create any problem or hurt the dealers. All I want is to have the VIN specific vehicle information automatically populated online (into our inventory mgmt tool, and then exported out to our various websites, etc.). Because I do spend the time editing every one of our vehicles (new & used, though this would be a tad bit more relavent for new), there wouldn't be any more data out there than there is now, except for the fact that it comes automatically from the OEM instead of my hours & hours of data entry.
- Dec 18, 2009
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- Mark
I think that is the reason we see more Dealers asking us to do new cars. We don't just take photos, we correct the data. Once one of my guys has touched the car you have 20+ photos and the correct data feeding out. The Dealers that have us do it have seen the benefits. I am amazed how many go out with the incorrect options. I would say we find more than our $15 charge on 90% of the cars. Most of the time it is thousands of dollars. Figure paying the guy $15 to check off $3,000 in options and the photos are a bonus.
- May 1, 2005
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- Jeff
HomeNet and Mercedes USA was working together on a project a few years back and it was heading in the right direction. Mercedes was sending HomeNet VIN specific accurate options and packages for the dealers used Mercedes-Benz Inventory. Of course any Mercedes dealer is able to jump into NetStar and copy the information over but it was a step in the right direction. Not sure what happened here...
Joe, I hear what you are saying but I won't speak on your behalf. I'm sure you'll be in there soon to elaborate.
Joe, I hear what you are saying but I won't speak on your behalf. I'm sure you'll be in there soon to elaborate.
- Apr 7, 2009
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- Joe
Bryan,
I totally understand your frustration*. If it was EASY, it'd already been done. Factories need to see $$revenue$$ to create change, and, If you really want change, find the 3rd specialists that are closest to the Manufacturers VIN/Options info. They PAY the manuf'ers to resell their data.
Applications - Chrome Systems
Autodata Solutions, Inc., a leading provider of technology solutions and services to the North American automotive sector.
Extended Data
Vinlink - Vin Decoder - Easy decoding
GM is VERY close to your idea, GM has a service called GMVIS, you drop in a VIN and WAMMO every friggin option code used in constructing that unit is there for you. With a little biit of "black hat" programming work, one could scrape GMVIS and use it to populate HomeNet's backend.
*I understand the VIN/Options quagmire. If you are a HomeNet customer, while in webiol options editing area, if you see the "strikeout & rename" of options and weighting that can be assigned to options, that's my baby, from back in 2002.
- Apr 7, 2009
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JK, there are few people on the planet that sees the whole battle field like you AND come up with creative solutions like you do. Never ever hold back bro, I ALWAYS want to read your take (I love it when I discover something new!)!
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- Apr 7, 2009
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- Joe
Bryan,
Give me a few minutes and look back in time. Think of what the Internet has done to entire retail industries. In the 90's, the shopping malls were filled with Travel Agencies that helped people book flights and create vacations.... BAM. GONE. Why did that happen? In the 90's if you wanted to invest in some stocks or funds, you'd get in your car, drive to "your" broker and see his advice. BAM. GONE. Think about why...
The Internet made research and decision making easy because it "pulled down the curtains" and allowed us all to see the data. The Automobile retail business has been spared from this in part due to the god-awful options collection process. Bryan, you know1st hand, that if you commit to doing it right (collecting every option), it takes forrrrrever! It's made worse, when you do it right, no one in management notices! Management is too busy chasing Social Media rainbows and unicorns.... (grrrrr... sorry, sore subject )
- On the new car side, we have TrueCar (New Cars Pricing and Comparisons Local, Regional and National Car Price Reports at TrueCar) making a very very creative price shopping solution.
- On the used car side, we have CarGurus.com ( Used Acura RSX For Sale Boston, MA - CarGurus ).
Both are lacking information for a complete price review. For a shopper to gain confidence, you have to have complete visibility and ease of analysis. The options SNAFU is one of reasons the Auto Industry has been spared. I made this DR forum post ( http://forum.dealerrefresh.com/f44/used-cars-cargurus-com-vauto-travel-industry-916.html ) about this very topic and we had CarGuru's CEO/Founder Langley Steinert came in for a reply, very cool (click here)! Mr. Steinert was co-founder & Chairman of the internet giant TripAdvisor.com
The 4 pillars that keep the Internet from crushing the auto retail industry as we know it are:
- The Options SNAFU
- Used Vehicle Condition Standards (not needed with New units)
- Valuing the Trade (AutoTrader is trying to address this need right now).
- Emotional purchase trigger (aka puppy love)
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Joe --
Thanks for the replies and very interesting points. Definitely hadn't thought about things this way. At least when it comes to the 'options SNAFU', I still think there is a much larger upside than downside in having the complete/accurate vehicle features online. As you discussed in the thread with the gentleman from CarGurus, there's often is a market-based reason why vehicle A is $3k more than vehicle B....trim level, equipment/features, sometimes even color. If we are trying to sell vehicle A and don't have these features listed online, how many customers will pass right by our vehicle (as opposed to the few who may call and inquire about the equipment and/or price difference)? Obviously this was part of the point you were making with CarGurus...to base their "good vs bad value" decision on incomplete vehicle information does everyone a disservice. If fact, I'd love to see a day when there was a universal vehicle listing method that all of venders used, which matched to a univerisal VIN decoder/inventory management service. Likely a pipe dream, I know, but it definitely wouldn't be impossible either. In the meantime, having the option of what sounds like what was in the works with HomeNet and Mercedes would at least get the correct/complete data on line for the buyers that are willing to dig into the details of the various vehicle listings, while saving all of us some serious data entry time. Similar to what you mentioned with GM, I did actually try to make an automated new Chrysler feed work for this purpose. Our OEM Chrysler website gets fed VIN specific vehicle data and then obviously gets populated to listings on the site. So I set up to have DDC, who hosts the site, send the vehicle data to HomeNet, who then in turn exported to my 3rd parties. Unfortunately, the data didn't translate across those channels as completely as I wanted, so now I've just reverted back to manual edits. But this also illustrates that the feed, at least from Chrysler, does exist! Why they wouldn't be willing to make the feed available to Chrome or any of the other VIN companies comes back to my original quandry. I don't get the sense they are not being paid enough for it....more so that for some reason the OEM's just don't want to provide it. Instead, again back to my original post, they end up with their dealerships wasting time on manual data entry or having incomplete vehicle listings online.
One last note on the HomeNet equipment editor. I actually have used the 'Strikeout' feature quite a bit. For both new and used, I basically stikeout any VIN exploded feature that is something the customer really doesn't need to see or has no impact on selling the vehicle (bright belt molding? driver door sill storage bin??). Works really well and would be a great feature even if my dream idea of an automated OEM feed ever became a reality (since it would still explode some of these irrelavent silly features). Have never used the "weight" feature though. Checked the IOL user manual and couldn't find a thing about it. Can you elaborate on how it works/what it does?
Thanks for the replies and very interesting points. Definitely hadn't thought about things this way. At least when it comes to the 'options SNAFU', I still think there is a much larger upside than downside in having the complete/accurate vehicle features online. As you discussed in the thread with the gentleman from CarGurus, there's often is a market-based reason why vehicle A is $3k more than vehicle B....trim level, equipment/features, sometimes even color. If we are trying to sell vehicle A and don't have these features listed online, how many customers will pass right by our vehicle (as opposed to the few who may call and inquire about the equipment and/or price difference)? Obviously this was part of the point you were making with CarGurus...to base their "good vs bad value" decision on incomplete vehicle information does everyone a disservice. If fact, I'd love to see a day when there was a universal vehicle listing method that all of venders used, which matched to a univerisal VIN decoder/inventory management service. Likely a pipe dream, I know, but it definitely wouldn't be impossible either. In the meantime, having the option of what sounds like what was in the works with HomeNet and Mercedes would at least get the correct/complete data on line for the buyers that are willing to dig into the details of the various vehicle listings, while saving all of us some serious data entry time. Similar to what you mentioned with GM, I did actually try to make an automated new Chrysler feed work for this purpose. Our OEM Chrysler website gets fed VIN specific vehicle data and then obviously gets populated to listings on the site. So I set up to have DDC, who hosts the site, send the vehicle data to HomeNet, who then in turn exported to my 3rd parties. Unfortunately, the data didn't translate across those channels as completely as I wanted, so now I've just reverted back to manual edits. But this also illustrates that the feed, at least from Chrysler, does exist! Why they wouldn't be willing to make the feed available to Chrome or any of the other VIN companies comes back to my original quandry. I don't get the sense they are not being paid enough for it....more so that for some reason the OEM's just don't want to provide it. Instead, again back to my original post, they end up with their dealerships wasting time on manual data entry or having incomplete vehicle listings online.
One last note on the HomeNet equipment editor. I actually have used the 'Strikeout' feature quite a bit. For both new and used, I basically stikeout any VIN exploded feature that is something the customer really doesn't need to see or has no impact on selling the vehicle (bright belt molding? driver door sill storage bin??). Works really well and would be a great feature even if my dream idea of an automated OEM feed ever became a reality (since it would still explode some of these irrelavent silly features). Have never used the "weight" feature though. Checked the IOL user manual and couldn't find a thing about it. Can you elaborate on how it works/what it does?
