Inventory and dealership website integration guide

What to check before you decide

Check status handling. A sold, pending or in-recon vehicle must change on the website within hours.

Ask how status changes travel, how often the feed runs and what happens when it fails. Count the sold vehicles still showing on the site as a weekly test.

Test price and incentive accuracy. Compare a sample of listed prices against the desk's numbers.

Check how the site shows rebates and fees, who approves them, and how they are removed when they expire. Advertising rules apply to what the page says.

Look at media and descriptions. Photos should arrive in order and at a usable size.

Descriptions should come from the decoded vehicle, not a template with errors. Get an answer on what happens when a photo is replaced, and how long it takes to show.

Think about the downstream feeds. The same data typically goes on to marketplaces and ad platforms.

A bad value repeats everywhere. Ask where each destination reads from.

Set up monitoring. A daily count of vehicles in inventory and on the site, with an alert when they differ by a set margin, catches most breaks. Give the alert an owner.

Treat the daily count as a standing control with a named owner, an alert threshold and a written first step when it trips, because inventory feeds fail quietly on weekends and holidays, and the stores that catch a stuck feed within hours are the ones that decided in advance who looks at it.

Add a rule for new arrivals, such as no vehicle goes live without at least one real photo, a decoded trim and a price, and have the feed hold any record that fails until someone fixes it.