How to speed up used car stock turn in a competitive market

Forecourt space is expensive, and every day a used car sits unsold eats into your margin. Pricing well matters, but so does cutting out the admin that delays a car from being advertised in the first place.

The hidden cost of "holding days"

Holding days represent the time between acquiring a vehicle and making it fully visible to retail buyers online. If a car sits on your forecourt for four days before its photos are live, its specs are uploaded, and it is published to advertising platforms, that is four days of depreciation and dead capital. Speeding up stock turn starts long before a customer walks onto the forecourt.

How to reduce time-to-market

• Use a number-plate lookup — Type the registration and let the make, model, year and specification fill in, rather than typing them by hand.
• Enter each car once — Avoid logging into several systems to list one car. Enter it in one place and publish to your website and marketplaces from there.
• Get pricing right on day one — Use market pricing data to price each car sensibly from the moment it is catalogued, so it draws interest while it is fresh.

Streamlining the digital forecourt

When your stock is spread across several systems, cars get stuck in limbo. With one place to enter the registration, add photos and publish, a car can be on your website and your adverts the day it arrives, rather than days later. Keeping your workflow lean keeps your forecourt moving.

How MotoVend handles it

On MotoVend you type a registration and most of the car’s details fill in, add photos in bulk from your desktop or phone, and publish to your website, and to AutoTrader and eBay Motors Pro if you choose, from the same record. When MotoVend publishes to AutoTrader, AutoTrader’s price guide appears in your stock list. More on stock management.