Auto Dealer Offers RSS of Inventory
One of the many hassles in buying an automobile has been driving to a dealer (or calling them) to see what they have in their inventory. In either case you usually have to dodge a salesman who really wants to get your name and phone number. All I want to know is whether you have a silver Eclipse, okay?
An automobile dealership in New Jersey has not only decided to put their inventory online, but they’re even offering an RSS feed of their newest arrivals.
The feed has a simple XSLT stylesheet for friendly browser display, and each item has information along these lines:
2006 MITSUBISHI ECLIPSE $30,334.00 - Contact Triplex BDC @ 888-880-3499
Status: New | Trim: 3DR GS-T 5 SPD | Color: TITANIUM PEARL | Miles: N/A
The beauty of this service is that you can create a custom feed based on the criteria you enter on their inventory page. (New or used, make, model, and price range.) The resulting feed will contain only the vehicles you’re actually interested in.
Lets hope this is the start of a new trend among dealerships. It may not make buying a car easier, but it might at least help you find one.
March 21st, 2006 at 19:55
Weird that they would use category for all of that rather than use the Google Base extensions and let Google index their inventory too.
April 6th, 2006 at 20:23
I’ve just recently added an RSS feed to the website for the dealership I work at to keep track of new inventory and after running a Google search to see if anyone else had thought of it earlier, discovered this little nugget. I never even considered making a RSS feed for the entire inventory, that’s really impressive.
April 17th, 2006 at 14:29
Thanks very much for the mention, Mark.
Kebernet: Had trouble importing RSS to G, using tab-delim instead. Category tags support another service.
William: Thanks
August 26th, 2006 at 05:44
New Feeds:
http://www.ikonauto.com/rss.cfm
http://www.meautogroup.com/rss.cfm
http://www.mallcars.com/rss.cfm