DMS and dealership website integration guide

What to check before you decide

Pick the fields that matter most: VIN, stock number, status, price, incentives, mileage, photos and description. Find out which system is the source for each, how often the data moves and what happens to a vehicle that disappears from the feed. A sold car must come down within hours, not days.

Pricing deserves special care. Advertised prices, rebates and fees must agree with what the desk will quote, and advertising rules apply.

Check how incentives enter the website and who approves them. Check a sample of vehicles each week against the desk's numbers.

Look at leads going the other way. Forms, chats and calls on the website should reach the CRM with the right source and the right vehicle. Submit a test lead from each form and confirm it arrives within a minute.

Ask about access and fees. The DMS vendor may charge to send data to a third party.

The website vendor may charge for each feed. Find out who pays.

Finally, set up a check. A daily count of vehicles in the DMS, on the website and on the main marketplaces will reveal a stuck feed. Alert the person who owns it.

Walk one vehicle through the whole chain by hand on a Friday afternoon, changing its price in the DMS and timing how long the new price takes to appear on the website and on each marketplace, because the delay you measure on a single car tells you more about the real feed than any promise in the contract.

Add the connection to the checklist for every price or incentive change, so that whoever updates the DMS knows to look at the website the same afternoon, and note any delay greater than a few hours.