Auto Trader Connect offers real-time car retail data feed as standard

Auto Trader has made its Auto Trader Connect real-time car retail market data portal free to all advertisers in a bid to help car dealers adapt with a market “moving at record pace”.

The online automotive marketing platform has said that over 2,500 retailers have already signed up to receive the benefit of real-time data sharing, while 70 third-party system providers have already integrated Auto Trader Connect into their platforms.

Auto Trader claims the feeding its real-time data into the stock management and marketing software of its retail customers has the potential to remove inconsistencies or errors are often the result of retailers having to manually update and rekey the same detail across multiple systems to keep adverts up-to-date.

Karolina Edwards-Smajda, Auto Trader’s commercial product director, said: “Even with access to real-time data, relying on data feeds is comparable to driving with the handbrake on. It impedes your ability to react to changes in the market, and in effect, your ability to secure the greatest margin for your stock.

“We wanted to utilise the full scale of our data to help our partners move away from this outdated and inefficient technology and to put them in the strongest position to capitalise on the strength of today’s retail market.

“We have been overwhelmed by the response, and in particular third-party providers who after seeing the results for their customers, have been quick to roll it out across their platforms.”

Robins & Day’s chief executive James Weston is one AM100 car retail group boss who believes data feeds are no longer suitable for the sector and has embraced the Auto Connect platform.

He said: “Simply put, relying on data feeds was causing us huge inefficiencies and ultimately put our business at a commercial disadvantage.

“As well as costing us valuable time and effort in manually correcting mistakes or inconsistencies, the data feed lags severely hampered our ability to react to changes in the market.

“At best this threatened potential margins, but at worst, it led to missing sales altogether.”

Velizar Dimitrov, director of eDynamix, explained why it had been so quick to adopt the new Auto Trader offering. He said: "This is 21st century technology, and the two-way transfer of data opens many new opportunities for retailers to embed the quality and variance of Auto Trader’s data in their own systems.

“It makes everything so much faster; pricing is synchronised and we’re already working with customers to automate processes, saving them even more time."