PLAYBOOK 02 · PRICING AND INVENTORY
The blind price cut. And the ladder that ends it.
Somebody cuts the price on day 45. Nobody can say whether the traffic went up, or whether the car was already dead. DealerCortex puts the cut, the traffic, the leads and the market on one line and gives every car an exit with a date on it.
The problem
A car lands. It gets priced from the book, or from the three cars around it, or from what the store owns it for plus a number. Then it sits in a list sorted by days in stock, and every week somebody scrolls that list and cuts the ones that feel old.
Nobody can answer the only question that matters: did the cut work? The traffic to the car lives in Google Analytics. The leads on the car live in the CRM. The market position lives in the pricing tool. The cost of each day on the lot lives in the owner's head. The price history lives nowhere at all once the website overwrites it.
What it costs
- The cut that proved nothing. $500 off a car with no traffic. It still has no traffic. The margin is gone and the problem was never price.
- The aged unit nobody noticed. Day 61 arrives as a surprise on a report. By then the exit options are retail at a loss or wholesale at a bigger one.
- The over-stock. Six of the same model on the lot in a market that absorbs two a month. The aging report will say so in 90 days. The regional supply said so on day one.
- No memory. Next year the store buys the same car again, because the record of what happened to this one was never kept.
How DealerCortex handles it
The car page. Every unit carries its own story: what the price has done since it was listed, what the market did over the same days, how much traffic the listing got each day, which leads came in on it, and what happened to each one. A price cut on day 20 sits next to the traffic on day 21. The owner can finally see whether the cut worked.
The Exit Ladder. Every car is placed on a ladder of exits: retail at full margin, retail at a cut, wholesale through a buyer network, wholesale at auction. Each rung carries the dollar outcome and the date by which the rung must be taken. Aged units stop being a surprise because the date was on the screen from the day the car landed.
The Reprice Queue. Cars that have fallen behind the market, cars whose traffic has died, cars at a rung deadline, all queued with a recommended move and the reason. Repricing becomes a ten-minute daily routine with a record of who did what and why.
Market Days Supply and demand tiers. Every car in stock is placed against the regional supply of that model and the demand for it, measured from search volume and listing velocity. The store sees which cars it is over-stocked on before the aging report says so.
The 24-Month Baseline. Two years of the store's own sales, turn, gross and inventory, laid out as the benchmark the whole system measures against. The question is never "is this good" but "is this better than this store's own last 24 months."
A lot where every car has an exit and a date, a reprice queue that moves before the loss is locked in, and a car page that answers "did the cut work" with the traffic line, not a feeling.
What changes in the first 30 days
The price history for every car in stock is pulled back on day one, so the boards start with a past. The exit ladder is populated by the end of the first week. The Friday "scroll and cut" meeting turns into a ten-minute queue with reasons, and the first aged unit gets its exit before day 61 instead of after.
DEALERCORTEX AI