• Stop being a LURKER - join our dealer community and get involved. Sign up and start a conversation.

Reply to thread

We're in the same boat as you on this one. It's unreliable and a little unintuitive to use; part of that is the salesperson, but the bulk of it is the fact we shouldn't have to teach them when it will or won't work.


If they leave midway through a scan, it won't work for anyone else until we exit and re-open the browser running the kiosk (we have just the one scanner by a manager's workstation at each dealer). It will work for me when I test it, then I repeat the steps for a salesperson and it blows up like I'm Wile E Coyote and the scanner is the Roadrunner; always works when nobody's looking.




We don't currently utilize VIN for service, but it does pull from our DMS (ADP) for RO's, and while it was a pain to get that put into place and working right, it does seem to be getting the data together. This was a nightmare of talking to Level 2's at VS, getting forms put together for ADP, getting the info back to VS then waiting. A lot of waiting. Past sales get capped at pulling for 5 years of data, to my understanding... at least that was what I was told.


I find that frustrating, because we've got salesmen that have sold history dating back to when I was still in elementary school, with those customers still coming back.




We had an issue with the numbers, when requested to be changed, taking some time to get changed.


Our experience has been mixed, despite my frustrations presented above.


As a website provider and for inventory management, for the most part we've been very satisfied. It's not as easy to run a string of specials as it is with say a Cobalt provided site where you can say "$3000 off these stock numbers from MM/DD/YYYY to MM/DD/YYYY, but it is still pretty solid. We had some issues getting our feed in from vAuto (love their appraising tool and pricing tools, which is why we keep them around), but that got resolved in due course.


As a CRM/ILM, we've been... OK, some of my people really despise Motosnap. The Byzantine labyrinth of granular control, for me, is a boon but I also build home theater PC's and bridged wireless networks as a hobby. My salespeople aren't all terrifically tech savvy, and our old workhorses who sell consistently and cleanly get really bothered when it doesn't just work. We had been using Autobase previously, and for as much as we hated it (and believe me; we hated it), introducing VS has created as many problems as it has solved. I've also got to give people way too much control/power if I want them to be able to send a video to their customer.


This isn't even to get started on the recent service outages, the general slowness we enjoy. The problems I run into over and over again are sparked, at least from the errors and the nature of the problems I see, from a DB server that's unhappy, dying or roped behind a network full of gremlins.


Don't get me wrong, I really do like VIN Solutions, but for the cost, it really doesn't feel like you get your money's worth a good deal of the time. I realize good things aren't free, and you've got to pay for quality, but what good is quality when it doesn't work? I'd rather drive a Cobalt that ran every time I turned the key and tracked straight and true than a Corvette that occasionally decided that the trees on the side of the road wanted to play chicken and only started up under the blessing of a full moon.


In short, you're not the only one. It seems from this end like their significant growth in recent times has outpaced their ability to add people to make up the difference.