DealerX e-leads

Overview

An e-lead is a lead that arrives electronically: a CarGurus or AutoTrader lead, a Facebook Lead Ads form, a website form, or an email in your lead inbox. DealerX turns each one into a contact and a lead marked E-lead, picks the Source from your match rules, and drops duplicates.

Steps

Give providers your lead address

Go to DealerX → Dealerships and click Edit on the dealership.
Copy the Inbound lead URL for providers and forms that post leads (JSON, ADF/XML or plain text all work), or the Lead inbox address for providers that email leads. Forward your existing lead inbox to that address.
For Facebook Lead Ads, connect the form through Zapier (or any automation tool) and post the lead fields as JSON to the Inbound lead URL.

A lead posted to the Inbound lead URL is saved before the provider gets its reply, then turned into a lead in the background, usually within 15 seconds. If DealerX can't save the lead, the provider gets an error (503) and can send it again. Sending the exact same lead twice imports it only once.

Leads from your website chat

When a visitor in your website chat leaves an email or phone number, DealerX creates an e-lead from it automatically, once per conversation. This works wherever the chat asks for contact details:

an Email Input or Phone Input node, or a Form Group with Email or Phone fields, in the chat's workflow,
a workflow the AI assistant offers during the chat (for example a trade-in appraisal form), and
the contact form the AI assistant shows, for example for a test drive.

If the visitor left an email or phone but no lead was created yet, DealerX creates it when the conversation completes.

The lead gets the source Website - Request Information, goes to your first active dealership, and has a note with everything the chat collected plus the visitor's last chat messages. Trade-in answers fill the lead's trade-in: a field whose name contains VIN becomes the trade-in VIN, Mileage (or Miles, Odometer) the mileage, and Year, Make and Model the trade-in vehicle. The trade-in is added when the chat collected at least a make and a model; other answers such as color, accidents, repairs, modifications or damage are listed in the note. Nothing needs to be set up beyond having DealerX on your plan and a dealership.

Match leads to sources

Go to DealerX → Sources and click Edit on a source such as CarGurus.
Under Match rules, enter one vendor name or sender domain per line, for example cargurus and leads.cargurus.com.
Click Save. Leads whose vendor name or sender domain contain a rule get that source. A lead whose vendor name is exactly a source's name also gets that source; everything else goes to Unknown.

What happens to a lead

The contact is matched by phone first, then email, and created when new.
A new lead is created with the stage New, temperature Fresh, the vehicle of interest and any trade-in from the e-lead, and the e-lead's comments as a note.
When Start the assistant automatically for e-leads is on and the lead has an email address, the AI sales assistant answers the lead's message by email right away (no greeting, no waiting for business hours). The message shows in Communications as the customer's first email. Website chat leads are not emailed, because the chat already answered them.
The lead is assigned by the lead assignment rules (fixed assignee of the source or dealership, then round robin), and the rep is told. See DealerX lead assignment.
When Start the assistant automatically for e-leads is on in DealerX settings, the AI sales assistant takes the lead in the default mode.

Duplicates

A lead is dropped as a duplicate when:

the provider sends the same lead id twice, or
the contact already has an active lead worked in the last 30 days. A note "Duplicate e-lead from …" is added to that lead instead.

A lead with no phone and no email is kept as failed with the reason "No contact details in lead".

Tips

Send a test lead with curl -X POST <Inbound lead URL> -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"name":"Test Lead","phone":"4165550199","vehicle":"2022 Civic"}' and watch it appear under Leads → Fresh a few seconds later.
Website forms can post the same JSON directly; the keys first_name, last_name, phone, email, vehicle, year/vehicleYear, make/vehicleMake, model/vehicleModel, vin/vehicleVin, mileage, trade_year, trade_make, trade_model, trade_mileage, trade_vin, comments/message and source are recognised. On a sell-your-car form (a sellOrTrade field, or a source containing "cash", "trade" or "sell") the vehicle fields describe the customer's car and fill the trade-in instead of the vehicle of interest.
Name trade-in form fields plainly (for example VIN, Mileage, Year, Make, Model) so chat leads fill the trade-in without extra setup.