Automotive retail
Inventory sits in one system, leads in another, and neither reaches the lot.
The software problem this industry has
A lead arrives at seven in the evening and gets answered on Tuesday. By then it's somebody else's sale.
Meanwhile inventory is accurate in the system nobody on the floor has open, and the customer-facing side of the business runs on whatever the platform decided a dealership website should look like in 2016.
Why generic tools fail it
The category is owned by a handful of dealer management platforms priced and scoped for franchise groups. An independent pays close to the same money for a fraction of the fit.
And the parts an independent actually needs — lead routing that's genuinely fast, inventory display that looks like their own brand, a customer-facing flow they control — are sold as enterprise add-ons, or not sold at all.
Where it hurts
- An evening lead gets answered the next business day.
- Inventory is accurate in a system nobody on the lot has open.
- Window stickers and ads don't lead to a conversation.
- Text marketing without airtight opt-out handling is a legal risk.
What we'd build first
- QR-to-text on every vehicle, tied to that unit's page
- Lead routing by dealer, location and vehicle
- One inbox, searchable in seconds
- Consent and opt-out handling built in, not bolted on
What we've built here
A text-and-QR lead platform for US dealerships, which we took over from a previous build and now run. A QR code on each vehicle opens that car's page and starts a text conversation; keywords on a shared short code route each message to the right dealer, location and vehicle; leads land in one searchable inbox; and an opt-out is honored across every keyword. Searching 190,000 leads went from about 90 seconds to about 8. Client unnamed.
Integration is most of the job in this category, so we treat it as the first question in the audit rather than an assumption: what your provider exposes, what's exportable, and what has to be handled another way — before anyone quotes a number.