The inventory management process begins with regular, reliable imports from your Dealership Management System (DMS). We import from all the popular DMS systems at least once a day. We do offer an enhanced service that reliably polls multiple daily pulls. Besides the normal imports from Reynolds & Reynolds, ADP, UCS and others we allow for a number of other import types:

• Vendor imports: you may have third party vendors who take pictures of your inventory and print your window stickers. There is tremendous value in having these vendors send us your inventory.
• Manual uploads: if you can create a text file or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with your inventory and send this to us, we can update your inventory and all its online destinations as regularly as you want.
• Power Data Entry. We have a fantastic service that allows you to enter multiple vehicles from a single page. VIN decoding is done after you input the stock, VIN and mileage for each vehicle. In this way you can enter vehicles in a matter of seconds!

You are always kept up to date on what vehicles are entering and leaving your inventory. The powerful inventory management email reporting system tells you how many vehicles purchase and ready for sale and how many vehicles are sold on a daily basis.

FAQ:

[ + ] What? I need to take my own photos? How can this be worth the effort?

Let's assume you sell 80 pre-owned vehicles each month and taken an equivalent amount of vehicles into your inventory each month. This means that your recon department sends about 4 vehicles to your retail lot each day. With the iMarketAuto™ multiple photo process you can create 9-12 high quality photos of each vehicle in approximately 15 minutes. The actual process is very simple; snap the photo and the photo automatically names itself after the vehicles stock number and floats up to your online inventory and distributes itself to all your online vehicle inventory destinations including your web site. All told you would spend no more than 4-5 hours each month taking your own high quality, customized, marketable, photos of your inventory. Contrast this with paying a sticker/photo company $15.00 per vehicle plus $200.00 per month. Assuming you utilize the downtime of a salesperson or task your Internet manager with this task you would realize savings of $1,400.00 per month. More than that you would be taking back greater control over how your inventory is promoted. Dealerships are finding that if they put a little time into their photo taking their Internet sales increase because of the high quality photos and lack of chronic, blurry, out of focus, ill-cropped photos. Increased sales and lowered costs are just two of the benefits of taking the photo process in-house. When dealership staff take an active interest in how their vehicles are marketed online a greater awareness exists over what cars are on the lot which can lead to cross and up selling of vehicles.

[ + ] In the past I have had trouble filtering wholesale vehicles from my pre-owned inventory report. Do you have any solutions for this?

DataOne Software employees expert Reynolds & Reynolds and ADP report creators. Armed with a detailed knowledge of the fields available to reports within these systems we can easily filter out wholesale vehicles using a plethora of strategies: Only pull status 1 vehicles. Only pull vehicles that contain certain numbers or letters within the stock number. Only pull vehicle that have a retail price. Only pull vehicles that have a retail price greater than a certain dollar figure. We can mix and match any of the above to reach a precision level that you are comfortable with.

[ + ] What if I want to continue using my DMS to edit prices, vehicle features, etc?

iMarketAuto™ is flexible and works with any franchise and/or preowned only dealership. You determine the process and through a couple of preference settings changes iMarketAuto™ Inventory Management will work right along with the way you do business. Utilizing a technology called 'HotSync' iMarketAuto™ can continually and automatically update its prices, mileage, vehicle features, inventory age – practically any data point on all your vehicles – directly from your DMS (Reynolds & Reynolds, ADP, UCS, etc). This means that you can use iMarketAuto™ Inventory Management for such things as seller notes while continuing to utilize your DMS as the origin for certain other vehicle details. These two system will work in harmony to get an exact representation of your inventory up on all your online lead generators including your web site.

[ + ] I use a sticker/photo specialty company. What is the value of using your system with theirs?

If you simply cannot justify the expense of utilizing an internal resource to take photos and print window stickers there is tremendous value in utilizing the DataOne iMarketAuto™ backbone along with your sticker/photo vendor. The iMarketAuto™ backbone is a network of high powered servers which work 24 hours a day to both distribute your inventory multiple times a day to up to 250 distinct online lead generators as well as most vehicle manufacturers. This system is rock solid and solves such common problems as having inventory and/or photos disappear intermittently from your online lead generators. How it works Your data collection vendor simply arranges to have a regular feed of inventory sent to iMarketAuto servers along with multiple photos. We then give you access to the iMarketAuto backbone where you gain full control over your inventory; make changes to prices, add vehicles, archive vehicles – do whatever you want. These changes are then broadcast to your lead generators resulting in an accurate reflection of your inventory at all your Internet selling points.

[ + ] I still need to convince higher management. Can you provide me some cost benefit studies that prove that taking inventory management back in-house is more profitable (some printouts would be very helpful)?

Meet Colonial Automotive, a large dealership group that includes Nissan, Subaru, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Chevrolet, Ford and Mazda franchise operations. The Colonial Automotive Group began in Acton, MA with the establishment of Colonial Chevrolet in October 1992. Since then, the organization has grown and thrived, and today comprises 14 dealership locations throughout. The Colonial Automotive Group sells over 10,000 vehicles annually, and is one of the fastest growing and largest dealership organizations throughout New England. They employ over 450 employees and regularly receive customer satisfaction awards from the franchisers they represent, such as the prestigious Ford Motor Company Blue Oval Certification, Daimler Chrysler's 5-Star Certification, Volkswagen's Crest Award, Subaru Stellar Performer Certification, and Subaru President's Club Award. Prior to 2000 the Colonial Automotive Group used sticker/photo third party vendors to market their preowned vehicles online. However beginning in 2000 they fired these companies and took the operation in-house, assigning a point person at each dealership to maintain 90% of their preowned vehicles with photos and window stickers. How did this decision work out for Colonial? "We have been using DataOne’s web-based iMarketAuto™ inventory management system for years. The iMarketAuto™ system has helped us to reduce our used vehicle labeling costs by 60% and enhance our Internet business dramatically. The iMarketAuto™ system allows us to post our vehicle inventory to numerous automotive websites without the duplicate efforts to maintain that inventory on each individual site. Since our inventory of over 1,500 used vehicles changes daily, this is a benefit in maintaining an up-to-date web presence. With iMarketAuto™ we can adjust, monitor and control the inventory from DataOne's single application. --Richard White, IS Director/General Manager, Colonial Automotive Group In fact the Colonial Automotive Group credits their new in-house process along with iMarketAuto for a 21% increase in online sales the very first year they started using the service.

[ + ] What can you tell me about the industry in general? Is there a trend to do this (again, some printable info would be useful)?

The automotive retail industry has a reputation for being about 10 years behind current technology. This can be seen from the archaic look and feel to some of the DMS systems installed at dealerships as well as the unreliable systems being used at thousands of dealerships to distribute their inventory online and to their web sites. As an awareness builds in the industry a trend is building as well. Now it is far less expensive and very easy to capture photos, seller notes and other key points in-house and broadcast these to a dealers web site, AutoTrader, Cars.com, and others. Now that the challenge has been taken out of the equation dealers are realizing the other benefits to assigning a specific person to market their vehicles instead of relying on a blue collar work force. Benefits: The ability to take pride in each photo and craft photos that will motivate online shoppers to submit leads. The ability to be picky about the day and time at which photos will be taken. With a sticker/photo vendor dealerships frequently find that their photos are taken on cloudy days, rainy days, even snowy days. The added awareness of the details on each of your vehicles. Dealers that take their own photos and print their own window stickers are more aware of the optional equipment and other selling points on each of their preowned vehicles. They are better prepared to describe the vehicle.

[ + ] Ok, where is the fine print? How much does this cost? What is the term on the agreement?

In reading about iMarketAuto™ Inventory Management you have frequently seen the cost savings as a large benefit to the service. The DataOne philosophy is to let the iMarketAuto™ service continue to prove itself to dealerships; that the quality and benefits of the service is what should keep dealerships using it in the long term, not contract terms. For this reason, the service is offered on a month-to-month term unless a dealership feels more comfortable with a one-year agreement. There is no fine print, only a few clauses that state that we will never sell or give confidential information obtained from your DMS to anybody. iMarketAuto™ Inventory Management is a $5.00 per vehicle service with no other monthly charges or extra fees. Window stickers and buyers guides are drop shipped to your dealership at 25 cents a sheet. Click here to run a few figures through our cost-benefit calculator. This will give you a detailed print out of the cost savings involved with moving to our service.