Stop Playing Inventory Roulette: The Real Reason Your Cars Don’t Show Up Online
Inventory data is the quiet thing running your entire dealership, and most people treat it like an afterthought. That’s a problem. The way your inventory data moves through your systems right now is broken, and it’s costing you sales, time, and ad dollars you don’t get back. I was talking with a dealer recently who was proud of his setup. He bragged about how his Inventory Management System pulls from multiple sources and how he wanted to use its API to send that data to us. On paper, it sounded sharp. In reality, it exposed the exact problem almost every store has. I asked him a simple question: “Do you actually know what LiftKit is supposed to fix?” That opened the door. He started describing what I call the “telephone game” of data. Your Dealer Management System (DMS) sends inventory in its format to an Inventory Management System. That inventory management tool ingests it in its format. Right there, your inventory data is already out of sync. It’s not hypothetical. Dealers see this every day:
Cars in the DMS that don’t show up in the Inventory Management System
Pricing mismatches
Missing fields that quietly kill visibility
Then it gets worse. That same Inventory Management System sends its version of your data to marketplaces like CarGurus or AutoTrader. Those sites ingest it in yet another format. Now you’ve got a second layer of distortion. So you see weird stuff like:
A car live on CarGurus but invisible in your inventory tool
Vehicles missing from one ad channel but present in another
Then your ad partners step into the mess. They often lean on third-party tools to parse this already mangled data. Every handoff is another chance to drop a field, break a price, or lose a car. By this point, your inventory data is a guessing game. You think you’re advertising 100% of your active inventory. In reality, you might be at 60–70% across your channels. You pay to run ads on “your inventory,” but:
Some cars never make it into a feed
Some are wrong
Some are ghosts that shouldn’t be live at all
That’s lost gross, lost appointments, and confused shoppers… all because your inventory data gets chewed up in transit. This is exactly where LiftKit comes in. LiftKit pulls from the same places as everyone else, but it refuses to play the telephone game. Instead of forcing everything into one rigid format and pushing that out to the world, LiftKit:
Cleans and restructures your inventory data
Fills in missing fields that keep cars from showing
Applies your rules on pricing, merchandising, and visibility
Sends data to each partner in their preferred format, not ours
So CarGurus gets what CarGurus needs. Your website gets what your website needs. Your ad partners get clean, consistent inventory data that actually matches what’s in your DMS. As I walked the dealer through this, you could see the lightbulb go on. He realized LiftKit had likely been fixing issues he didn’t even know existed. Not sexy “AI magic.” Just ruthless control over inventory data so cars show up where they’re supposed to. Here’s what LiftKit actually connects into:
Your DMS
Your inventory tools
Your website
Your ad partners
Then it does the boring, important work:
Cleans the data
Fixes problems that hide vehicles
Keeps pricing and fields intact
Syncs everything through a fast API
No broken feeds. No “Why isn’t that car online yet?” No guessing which partner dropped the ball. Right now, your data probably gets wrecked as it moves from system to system. Fields fall off. Prices break. Vehicles never go live. Then your team spends hours chasing ghosts. LiftKit cleans the stream so every vehicle reaches every channel. That’s it. Simple idea, big impact. Stop playing the inventory “telephone game.” If you’re serious about sales, stop assuming your feeds are fine and start taking your inventory data seriously. That’s where your real leverage is.
See more at www.LiftKit.io
