How We Embedded Payments in our DMS

By: Joe Keehnast , VP of Product, DealerBuilt

Building Payments into the DealerBuilt Product Suite

This year, the leadership team at DealerBuilt is making a commitment to do more “building in public” - being more open about the rationale, thinking, and process we use to evolve our product line and answer the call from dealers who just want technology that helps them run their business their way. 

We’re starting that series by announcing our release of integrated payments as part of our product suite (including our Lightyear DMS, Oplogic CRM, and iService Fixed Ops tools). We’re especially proud of this addition to our product line - not only for how we answered an important ask from our customer base, but also how we did so in line with our commitment to doing what’s right for our dealers.

With DealerBuilt Payments, we are extending what the DealerBuilt platform can do for you and smoothing out some of the day-to-day frictions we consistently hear about from dealers across the country. Here’s how we did it:

What We Heard

As we started our initial research into the world of dealership payments, we heard two main complaints from our customers that told us this was a problem worth solving: 

Complaint 1 - Payments are cumbersome  

Most dealers are using a payment processor that does not tie in with their DMS. This means they are manually typing in a balance when they need to take a payment. It means once they take the payment, they need to go into their DMS and make sure the payment is entered properly for accounting. And then, there’s the whole “staple the little receipt to the other papers we have to print for them.” Our customers have been asking, “In 2024, do I really still need to enter this information manually? Do I still need to staple? Can’t this happen more automatically?”

Complaint 2: Payments cost me a lot - I think? 

Customers often choose payments provider on one of two factors: Convenience and cost. As part of our product research, we asked several customers a simple question - “What is your payments provider costing you today?” The answers surprised us. Some customers didn’t know, and some customers thought they knew and when they looked into it realized they were wrong. What was nearly universal was the feeling that they weren’t confident they were getting a fair deal on their transaction costs.

Payment processors don’t have the world’s most transparent pricing. Processors will often quote a blended rate - which can change based on whether a payment is taken in-person, online, or over-the-phone. That blended rate can obscure what you will actually pay, based on your unique transactional mix and the channel you take most of your orders on. Payments providers will also often quote a “headline rate” - basically the best possible rate that a merchant could enjoy, but that often changes based on a number of different factors, including additional fees which can be difficult to understand or predict in advance. These tiered pricing structures can be confusing for customers. 

So this is why a simple question (“How much are you paying your payments provider?”) can be surprisingly difficult to answer.  

What We Built: 

Powered by a partnership with Global Pay, one of the world’s most trusted payments providers + merchant acquirers, we believe we’ve created a payments solution that not only can save dealers money, but also helps them bypass some of the painful data issues that come with the simple act of taking a payment from a customer. 

With any new product or feature, we take the time to map the aspects of the product that we believe are table stakes (the “minimum effective dose” of value customers expect) as well as those that can differentiate us from competitors. It was important for our payments solution to do everything that dealers expect from their provider today - accept physical credit cards in their service lane, use digital wallets like Apple Pay, and send receipts on-demand via text or email. But we also invested in a few aspects of the product that we believe directly address dealer’s asks when it comes to the point-of-sale - namely:

These may seem like small details, but in a dealership group that serves hundreds or even thousands of customers a month, significant savings can result from removing small obstacles.

Final Thoughts

At DealerBuilt, we believe in the power of listening to our customers and innovating based on their needs. Embedding payments into our DMS is just one of the many ways we’re committed to enhancing the operational efficiency of dealerships by bringing more technology together so you don’t have to. We’re looking forward to sharing more “how we built this” updates this year. 

In the meantime, you can learn more about our Payments solution here  - including how our team can help you get you up and running if you’re reconsidering how payments works inside your dealership.