A Broken Feed Is Invisible Until It Is Expensive
When an inventory file stops arriving, nothing breaks loudly. The website keeps working, the pages keep loading, and the cars that should have appeared this week simply are not there. Somebody usually notices days later, when a salesperson goes looking for a listing — by which point the shoppers who wanted those cars have been somewhere else and bought something.
✓Inventory Monitor watches both directions: the inventory coming in from your DMS, and the listings going out to the marketplaces you advertise on.
What Gets Recorded
On every run
Counted, Not Just Timed
Every import is recorded as a run of its own: how many vehicles were processed, how many succeeded and how many failed, with the time it started and the time it finished. “The feed ran last night” is not the same statement as “the feed ran last night and every car landed”, and this is the difference between them.
On a run that went wrong
The Error Is Kept
A failure is stored against the run that produced it, along with what went wrong. Nobody has to reproduce the problem to find out what it was, and a run that failed at three in the morning can still be read at nine.
In your dealership admin
Your Own Run History
The history belongs to your dealership and sits in your own admin, so the answer to “did our inventory come in this morning?” is a page you open rather than a phone call you make. You are looking at the same record we are.
On the feed itself
Watching For The File
Beyond individual runs, the feeds themselves are watched: whether the files that are supposed to arrive actually arrive, and whether a run has gone quiet on either the inbound or the outbound side. A feed that has simply stopped is the failure mode that hides best, so it is the one worth watching for.
Feeds In, Listings Out
Your inventory arrives from your DMS and leaves again as listings on the marketplaces you advertise on. Both halves of that journey are the same set of vehicle records, and both halves are recorded the same way — because a car that never reached a marketplace is exactly as unsold as a car that never reached your own website.
✓Running several stores? Each location can bring its own feed from its own provider — see Multi-Location Support. Vehicle history from one of those outbound destinations is covered on CARFAX® Snapshot.
What It Requires
What we need from you
A feed from your DMS provider, and permission for us to receive it. We support the providers our dealerships already use and add new ones as they come up, so the question is rarely whether your system can be read — it is who at your provider signs the request.
On our side
Monitoring is part of running your inventory rather than an extra you switch on. Every run is recorded as it happens, so the record is already there on the morning you need to go back and look at it.
When did your inventory last fail to load? If you cannot answer that, that is the problem this solves.
Or email support@carcasm.com and a real person will read it.