Past experience:
Autotrader (Trader Media) always used to offer a feed facility (using a format of their own that has become something of a standard – DMS-14). Ask your client to talk to his Autotrader representative about DMS-14 feeds or whether they have been replaced with an alternative. It may be that they no longer offer this to individual small dealers; I would not be surprised.
The approach involved uploading a zip file of images and a DMS-14 feed file to an autotrader FTP site. DMS-14’s feed description was just a CSV file. The header row looked like this:
“Feed_ID”,”Vehicle_Id”,”FullRegistration”,”Colour”,”FuelType”,”Year”,”Mileage”,
“Bodytype”,”Doors”,”Make”,”Model”,”Variant”,”EngineSize”,”Price”,”Transmission”,
“PictureRefs”,”ServiceHistory”,”PreviousOwners”,”Description”,”FourWheelDrive”,
“Options”,”Comments”,”New”,”Used”,”Site”,”Origin”,”v5″,”Condition”,”ExDemo”,
“FranchiseApproved”,”TradePrice”,”TradePriceExtra”,”ServiceHistoryText”,”Cap_Id”
So you’d just need to be able to produce a CSV file of your data, and package the high resolution versions of your images into a zip file with this CSV data.
This may have been replaced by DMS-15 which they seem to be offering for certain products.
Based on my own personal experience of dealing with this feed, though, it has two key problems.
First, the vehicle matching was (perhaps necessarily) fuzzy; a vehicle could fail to load (needing manual correction at Trader Media’s end) because its description was imprecise, but no warning or feedback was provided or could be provided in these cases, leaving my client to follow up with their representative each time.
Second, the feed cycle was _slow_; a vehicle upload needed to be done before 10:30am but the data would not appear on Autotrader’s site for 24 hours. If there was a slight mistake in the vehicle description causing a failure of matching, we waited another whole day.
This made it impractical for one of my clients, who resorted to using Dealer Edit in parallel, and another abandoned my service altogether at my recommendation, because I simply couldn’t build a system responsive enough with that feed.
N.B. My experiences date from about 2008; things may have changed. I hope so.
