Improvements to vehicle history and condition on Auto Trader adverts

As we continue to improve Auto Trader for both retailers and their customers, we have introduced some changes to Auto Trader adverts to enable better vehicle history and condition transparency, helping improve consumer trust and save retailers’ time. To enable a better consumer experience vehicle ownership and history information is now more prominent on Auto Trader adverts as seen in the examples below. With this new change we are encouraging retailers to fill in this information when creating adverts.

What do partners need to do?

To enable this feature for retailers, Partners should ensure that the vehicle history and condition fields are available for retailers in their system so that retailers can populate these fields which will then display the information on their adverts as pictured above. The details of the required fields that will enable this feature can be found in the developer docs or can be pictured below.

These data points have been available in the API for some time, but we have seen underutilization of the fields which has meant that many retailers do not have this information displaying on their advert. An example of this can be pictured.

Many retailers already include vehicle history and ownership information within their advert descriptions so once the change has been implemented you may want to inform your retailers that this feature is now available within the API so that they can benefit from the changes.

How will it impact retailers?

While many retailers are already including this information within their advert descriptions, this can often be missed by buyers. Allowing and encouraging retailers to use these specific fields for this information will create a better experience for your retailers and their consumers and helps to increase consumer confidence. Additionally, as more adverts have this feature enabled, adverts not displaying vehicle history and ownership information may look out of place which could harm consumer trust in the retailer.

These fields are already available in both the API and on Auto Trader, so we advise Partners to complete the work highlighted in the developer docs to allow retailers to start displaying this information on their adverts. If these data points are already mapped, you may want to communicate to your retailers that filling in this field will now display information on their Auto Trader adverts as shown in the previous example.

If you would like to learn more about implementing these changes, please visit our website or if you require further assistance or have any questions about implementing these changes, please contact our technical account management team on: technicalaccountmanagement@autotrader.co.uk