Accountability: what a great idea!
Recently, a big shot dealership from Harrisburg, PA contracted me to handle all their third party data feeds. Autotrader, Cars.com and Vehix all get fat files full of vehicle data and pictures at least once a day to populate this dealer’s accounts. While this process is largely a set-it-and-forget-it, it could hardly be as easy.
The Car Lot Camera Guy
Big shot dealership doesn’t take hundreds of photos of all the cars they sell. Instead, they pay some guy with a digital camera and a barcode VIN scanner to do it for them. Great! The more nerds the better, right? I feel that any opportunity to bring more computer people into the dealership is a good one. Man am I wrong.
For the past six months of our relationship, I’ve battled countless “where’s my car” arguments with our transmission logs and carbon copied emails. Since I’m not shooting the shit at the dealership all morning like Car Lot Camera Guy, I’m the first to blame. The data distribution service I provide has never been disrupted throughout our entire contract, and I’ve been able to consistently back that up with evidence.
Car Lot Camera Guy has, well, a camera and a barcode reader. Each time there is a problem I ask for the stock numbers in question and report back within the hour with what happened. Car Lot Camera Guy thinks he uploaded the pictures on the 13th.
Automotive marketing 
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