Whilst MotorDesk provides dealership websites as standard, you may choose to utilise a third-party dealership website either by creating a website yourself, or using an outside website development service or alternative dealership website provider.
MotorDesk not only offers various ways for you to feed vehicle data from MotorDesk to your third-party website, but also to integrate features like enquiry forms, online reservations, and even MotorDesk's Online Checkout.
When you have a third-party hosted website, MotorDesk will always continue to provide a secondary website for your business in order to provide features such as the online invoicing and vehicle handover processes, as well as to enable integration of features such as the online reservations. However, this secondary website can be set-up in a way that redirects visitors back to your primary website, giving you a seamless integration with your primary website.
In order to provide the secondary website a suitable website address/domain name must be used. The website address can be the generic AutoServer.co.uk address we provide when you set-up your account, however these addresses do not support email. As such, we recommend you register a new domain for this secondary website, which we can usually register and maintain for you free of charge. If, for example, you have a .co.uk domain name we would recommend registering the equivalent .uk domain to enable your visitors to transition seamlessly between the two websites.
For example:
We provide a special website template called 'Redirect' when setting up a secondary website, this template disables the website homepage, as well as the vehicle information pages, replacing them with redirects back to your primary third-party hosted website.
Click here to install the Redirect website template.
Once installed, please go to the Website -> Pages section in MotorDesk and select to edit your 'Redirect To Website' page. At the top of the page you'll find the 'Redirect' module which by default links to the /setup-instructions/ page. Select the plus icon to the top left of this module, then select the pencil icon to edit the module, then amend the 'Redirect To' value to link to your third-party primary website homepage.
You will now have a MotorDesk website set-up ready to provide features like online invoicing, but which redirects to your primary website from sections like the homepage.
By default, the redirect template will have a generic redirect to your primary website homepage. You can, however, amend this to forward vehicle data onto your website from MotorDesk's vehicle-specific pages, which you can then detect to redirect to your own vehicle information pages - helping maintain links from features such as social media posts and silent salesman sheets.
To set-up vehicle redirects go to the Website -> Pages section and select to edit the 'Information' page. At the top of the page you'll find the 'Redirect' module which links to your /redirect-to-website/ page, and then on to your primary website page. Select the plus icon to the top left of this module, then select the pencil icon to edit the module, then amend the 'Redirect To' value to link to a specific vehicle page on your website.
At this point the vehicles will still only link to a single generic page, however the 'Redirect To' value can be amended to include the following values:
You can therefore set a Redirect To value which passes these values over to your website, e.g. https://yourdomain.co.uk/vehicle/?vrm={VEHICLE_REGISTRATION}&vin={VEHICLE_VIN}
Once this is set-up, you will then need to detect these values on your website and redirect accordingly - this will require your own development which we cannot provide guidance for.
Here is an example of the set-up you would have when you want the links in your social media posts to redirect to their respective vehicle pages on your Car Dealer 5 website.
The URL in your social media posts which link to your vehicle page will have this format: https://yourdomain/sm/XXXXXX
To have these links re-direct to their respective vehicle pages on your Car Dealer 5 website, you will need to edit your Vehicle 'Information' page, found in the Website -> Pages section.
Once you are editing this page, you will need to then edit the 'Redirect' module at the top of the page. Now you will edit the 'Redirect To' setting and change this to your Car Dealer 5 domain but adding '/vrm/{VEHICLE_REGISTRATION}' onto the end.
For example:
Now the links in your social media posts will correctly redirect to their respective pages on your Car Dealer 5 website.
If you are having any trouble with this, please send a message to support and we will help you where we can.
If you use a third-party website but want to include certain MotorDesk features, such as the reservation form, you can do so by linking customers to your MotorDesk site using specially formatted redirect URLs.
To use this functionality, you must first set up a MotorDesk secondary website. Refer to the section above for instructions on how to do this.
Once your secondary website is configured, you should have the following:
Redirect URLs are created by appending specific query parameters to your MotorDesk website URL. The URL should follow this structure:
https://yourmotordeskwebsite.co.uk/?redirect_vrm=MT04DSK&redirect_to=reserve
This example URL directs the user to the reservation form for the vehicle with the VRM MT04DSK.
On your third-party website, you can add buttons or links that point to this URL, replacing the VRM value with the appropriate vehicle registration. For example :
Each link takes the customer directly to the reservation form for the specified vehicle.
In the examples, the URL uses the VRM to identify which vehicle to take the user to. We also provide these following options to use instead :
In the examples, the URL redirects users to the reservation form. We also provide these pages to be redirected to instead :
Using these two lists of options, you should now be able to efficiently construct URL's that will take users to any of the listed pages on your secondary MotorDesk website.
For example, if we only have the VIN of a vehicle and we would like to use that to take the user to the online checkout on our secondary MotorDesk website.
We first construct the URL:
https://yourmotordeskwebsite.co.uk/?redirect_vin=123456789&redirect_to=checkout
Now on your third-party website, you will create a button/link that takes the user to the URL you have just created.
We have several methods for feeding vehicle data from MotorDesk to your third-party website. Please note, if you are using a third-party website then you are responsible for your own website development and we cannot provide support for this.
MotorDesk WordPress Plugin
MotorDesk provides a WordPress plugin which offers a vehicle search tool with vehicle information pages, available to set-up in seconds via your WordPress administration panel.
XML Feed
MotorDesk provides a XML feed sales channel which provides a comprehensive XML file of your vehicle data. To set this up, simply go to the Business -> Sales Channels section and select to add the XML Feed sales channel.
AutoTrader Connect
If your dealership has developer access to AutoTrader Connect, you can use MotorDesk to upload vehicle data directly to AutoTrader. Your website can then be set up to download this data from AutoTrader, ensuring a smooth and automated data flow.
Once you have your vehicle data appearing on your primary third-party hosted website you may like to integrate MotorDesk's features such as vehicle reservations, and even MotorDesk's Online Checkout. There are two simple ways to do this, either via a regular website link to your secondary website, or by embedding iFrames in your website.
Website Link
To link to these features on your website simply use the website URL available via your vehicle data feed, and amend one of the following values to the end of the URL:
For example you'll have a URL similar to: https://yourdomain.uk/vehicles/AA11AA11/Vehicle-Make-Model-Derivative/reserve/
Embedding iFrames
If you have the Redirect website template installed you can utilise iFrames. To embed iFrames on your website simply use the URLs listed in the previous section, but append the ?iframe query string to hide the website header and footer, e.g. https://yourdomain.uk/vehicles/AA11AA11/Vehicle-Make-Model-Derivative/reserve/?iframe
Example iFrame Code:<iframe src="https://yourdomain.uk/vehicles/AA11AA11/Vehicle-Make-Model-Derivative/reserve/?iframe" id="motordesk_iframe" width="100%" height="600" frameborder="0"></iframe>
The above example will provide a fixed height iFrame, whereas the following example utilises automatic height resizing to adjust the iFrame height to the size of the content.
Example iFrame Code with Automatic Height Resizing:<iframe src="https://yourdomain.uk/vehicles/AA11AA11/Vehicle-Make-Model-Derivative/reserve/?iframe" id="motordesk_iframe" width="100%" height="600" frameborder="0"></iframe>
<script src="https://asset.motordesk.com/iframe-resizer/iframeResizer.min.js"></script>
<script>(function() {iFrameResize({autoResize:true,heightCalculationMethod:'taggedElement',log:false,checkOrigin:false,onMessage:function(messageData) {if (messageData.message==='loaded') {document.body.scrollTop = document.documentElement.scrollTop = 0;}}}, '#motordesk_iframe');})();</script>
Again, please note the above code will not work correctly unless you have the Redirect website template installed. Please also note we can not provide support for implementation of these tags in your website.