If you advertise your vehicles on Trade Me you would have recently received communication from them on their new image policies which will take effect from March 9th, 2020.  This will impact the majority of the dealers listing vehicles on Trade Me as you are no longer allowed to include dealership logos watermarked on your images.

Below is a quick guide for how your images should look on Trade Me Motors.  Note - these images and text were supplied by Trade Me Motors and any mention of "we"/"our support"/"contact us" refer to Trade Me Motors and NOT AutoPlay.  AutoPlay are sharing this information as a helpful resource to ensure your listings meet Trade Me policy.

If you export from AutoPlay and your listing photos currently include branding watermarks it is possible that your listing will not appear on Trade Me after 9th March 2020.  As such, as of March 9th, 2020 AutoPlay will remove any dealership logo watermarks that are currently being applied by AutoPlay to your listings.  This will ensure that your listings remain on Trade Me and are not blocked from being returned in Trade Me search results.  Due to the effort involved in this AutoPlay will not individually engage with each dealership - we will automatically remove them from your Trade Me export from 9th March on-wards.

• Trade Me allow an exception for approved branding so AutoPlay will not remove watermarks for Honda Certified, Toyota Signature Class or Toyota Certified, or Audi Approved.  See guidelines HERE.
• AutoPlay will not be able to edit any watermark that is supplied to us already embedded on your listing photos.  If you send photos to AutoPlay via your DMS or another source please check that they do not have watermarks on them or you risk your listing being blocked from Trade Me.
• AutoPlay will not be able to ensure the background signage in your listing images meets Trade Me requirements.  It is the dealerships responsibility to review your images to ensure they meet the new standards.

Hundreds of dealers have already signed up to receive leads via DRIVEN's new lead generation packages, don’t miss out on yours.
 
Select your preferred DRIVEN lead generation package, and as a thank you from the DRIVEN team, you’re in the draw to WIN a $15,000 NZME advertising campaign for your dealership.*
 
Check out the packages below and choose the one which is best for you.

Standard Lead Generation is available as Driven's fixed rate package, all you’ll pay is a small monthly subscription, up to 80% cheaper than what you'll pay elsewhere. This covers having your listings promoted to Driven's motoring audience of 133k monthly** and unlimited email enquiries.
 
Enhanced Lead Generation package is Driven's performance based pay per lead model for dealers who want to accelerate their growth faster. This package gives you access to the full dealer toolkit of lead generation options.

​Furthermore, Christmas has come early, you won’t pay anything until 2020 - with extended free access right until the end of the year.

Contact Driven via support@driven.co.nz to have one of the DRIVEN Specialists get in touch with further information.
 
*Competition drawn 16th December 2019. **SOURCE: Nielsen Online Ratings October 2019

Kiwis love their cars. In fact, our roads are home to around 4 million of them. New Zealand is also a proudly diverse nation, with hundreds of ethnicities and languages spoken on our streets. It makes sense, then, that consumers be able to find and buy a new vehicle in their own language. ​

AutoPlay are always looking to share good news with our customers and HouGarden represent a opportunity to target a specific audience.  AutoPlay have worked with HouGarden to make this easy for AutoPlay customers as we have a direct connection via an AutoPlay Data API.

Anytime, Anywhere
​​The HouGarden Motors platform has been designed to work optimally on both desktop and mobile, while smart new iOS and Android apps meet the demand of today’s on-the-go users. 

Elite Customer Base
During HouGarden's eight years of running New Zealand’s largest property portal for the Chinese market, HouGarden has dealt with thousands of elite professionals, including real estate agents, lawyers,bankers and developers. These same people are potential clients for your own business.  

Affluent, Highly-Motivated Audience
The New Zealand property market is very attractive to Chinese buyers who have a lot of disposable income. HouGarden Motors enables you to put your listings in front of an audience that’s very motivated to buy.

NZ-Based Support Team
The HouGarden team combines our Chinese backgrounds with local knowledge to develop online products for a New Zealand-based Chinese-speaking market. Their head office is located in Central Auckland.

How Do I Get Started?
Keen to improve your marketing results bylisting your vehicles on HouGarden Motors for FREE*? 
Visit https://nz.hougarden.com/motors 
Contact the HouGarden team on +64 9 377 5666 
or support@hougarden.com for  more information.
 
You can start to take the above benefits with HouGarden Motors by just signing a form (Dealership Data API Access Authorization) and send back to our email support@hougarden.com

EV Sales recently launched in NZ to give dealers and buyers alike a dedicated place for all things Electric Vehicles.

As an AutoPlay customer we've made it easy to advertise on EVSales.nz directly via the AutoPlay Studio.  Once you are signed up your Electric vehicles will automatically be sent to EV Sales via our API - simply load your listings as per normal and your EV listings will appear on the site.
​
EV Sales were recently an exhibitor at EV World South and report that they experienced overwhelmingly positive feedback from the public, saying how great the idea was and confirming the need for a central place for buying EVs.

Interest, site traffic, and listings are growing, and its the place you want to be!

Once you have signed up to list on The Dealership Network they will contact AutoPlay to enable access to your listings.  The Dealership Network (TDN) have hooked up to AutoPlay’s listing API so the moment you load a listing, it will be live on www.thedealershipnetwork.co.nz – with no need to manually select listings for export.

The Dealership Network introduces a completely new concept to help users find their next vehicle. With their Feature Finder they provide an alternative to the standard make, model, year search criteria, allowing their users to search by, feature, function, technology and other criteria to find all the makes and models from around the country that suit what they want from their next vehicle all from one simple search enquiry.
​
The Dealership Network is proud to only work with dealership listings, to give their users the trust and confidence when looking at any listing on their website. By integrating with AutoPlay they enable their users to "Book a test drive" or "Request a call back" that feeds straight into your lead API, connecting their users with your dealership and stock. The Feature finder search function incorporates the needs based selling approach onto an online platform. Allowing users to search from a combination of requirements and being able to recommend the specific makes and models that suit their needs. The refinement feature then makes it even easier to narrow these results for the user to find exactly what they are looking for

To find out more about EV Sales visit the site at https://evsales.nz/
To register your interest in advertising on EV Sales visit https://evsales.nz/account/register
​

Despite dealership websites overtaking Trade Me as the number one source of Leads, Test Drives and Sales – Trade Me is still NZ’s number one third party listing site and accounts for a reasonable portion of a dealerships online leads. 

The AutoPlay Support Team frequently gets calls from dealerships confused about why their listings have not made it to Trade Me.  Below is a quick checklist of things you need to know to make sure your listings get on to Trade Me first time, every time.

·         The listing must have a Year, Make, Model, Price, Transmission and Body Type
·         The listing Transmission and Body Type need to match Trade Me’s list of pre-defined options.  Trade Me do have a mapping table to map different Transmission or Body Types, but the further from their defined list the higher chance your listing will be frozen
·         The listing Make and Model must match Trade Me’s list of Makes and Models – if your Model doesn’t exist then you need to contact Trade Me to request it is added
·         The listing Body Type selected must match the Make/Model – you cannot load a Hilux as a Hatchback
·         The listing requires 1 of Chassis, VIN or Rego
·         The listing must not reuse a stock number
·         The listing Odometer cannot go backwards
·         The listing cannot contain special HTML characters
·         The listing cannot have any contact info/url’s etc anywhere within the listing – this includes on the images
·         The listing must have at least 1 image
·         If using Trade Me Super Feature the listing must have at least 3 photos

Follow these basic rules and you should find all your listings make it on to Trade Me at the first attempt and don’t get frozen.  If any of these rules are not followed it can cause delays with the listing making it to be live on the site, as Trade Me staff will need to get involved to review the listing.
​
AutoPlay offer a full range of Data Management services including populating stock pages on your website and exporting to third party portals.  If you have any questions about AutoPlay’s data management services contact us on +64 (09) 361 1505.

At AutoPlay we've always been all about integration.  Wherever possible we've looked to integrate our AutoPlay Sales Pipeline with other 3rd Party systems such as DMS and CRM  systems, through to vehicle checks via MotorWeb, CarJam and Motorcentral.

Provident Insurance are 100% kiwi owned and driven - just like AutoPlay.  So when the opportunity came up for AutoPlay to integrate with Provident Insurance it proved to be a no brainer.  For mutual customers that use Provident Insurance as their insurance provider, salespeople are able to tap a button to easily push info across to the Provident Insurance system - jump starting the Insurance Application process.  

Once complete, salespeople can jump into the Provident Insurance system without having to retype all the customer or vehicle information already captured in AutoPlay.  From there, it's a simple case of completing any information required by Provident that is not able to be supplied via AutoPlay in order to finish the insurance application.

1.  If you are already a customer and want to take advantage of this feature then the first step is to contact AutoPlay via support@autoplay.co.nz to request set up.  The purpose of this email is to give AutoPlay written permission to send customer and lead data to Provident Insurance. 

2.  Once we have permission, AutoPlay will contact Provident Insurance and request your unique Provident ID Number.

3.  Once supplied by Provident, AutoPlay will set up API access using your unique ID as the key to send data from AutoPlay Sales Pipeline to Provident Insurance.

4.  Once the export record is set up as per (3), the Provident Insurance option will be visible within the FINANCE & INSURANCE button.

5.  Once the button is visible when you wish to start a new Insurance application with Provident Insurance just open the lead with the customer who wishes to apply and click Finance & Insurance>Provident Insurance.

VIEW SAMPLE FILE

As we have mentioned in the PlayBook's recent issues the AutoPlay development team are busy rebuilding the Desktop Studio as a fully responsive HTML5 app - meaning users will be able to access the AutoPlay Studio via different browsers like Chrome, Firefox etc as well as via Android or Windows smartphones and tablets. 

We are now almost 10 weeks into our HTML5 rebuild and making decent progress.  To date the focus has been building the infrastructure - things like logins and security, navigation menus and account structures.  Although extremely necessary to the success of the project these are not the glamour screens we want to shout from the rooftops about.

We've recently completed the listings screen - a central pillar to the whole AutoPlay Studio.  The new listing screen will feature...

• Scrollable image gallery similar to current iOS App 
• Collapsible sections that can be collapsed to make scrolling up and down the screen easier
• Simplified menus - was 2 separate menus, now 1!
• Enhanced presentation of listings including graphical display of Fuel Saver

Check out the image gallery below to see our progress.  The project is massive so at this stage we are unable to provide an ETA of when this will be released (sorry!).  However, rest assured we are putting in as much resource as possible without sacrificing day-to-day business and we will keep you updated as we move closer to our goal.