Automotive Management caught up with Paul Hilton, head of retail at JATO Dynamics, to discuss dealers’ ability to ‘merchandise’ their stock better and minimise the risk of misinformation.
For readers who may not know JATO well, can you outline the breadth of JATO Dynamics’ activity?
JATO Dynamics has been around since 1983, UK-based but operating across more than 52 markets. We’re essentially the encyclopaedia of vehicle specifications and vehicle data. Our job is to catalogue what cars are built with when they leave the factory: the specification, the options, the packs, the features, and the pricing – not just the headline list price, but what each option cost new and how those trims and variants were structured. The important part is that we don’t just collect it; we normalise it. Every OEM describes products differently, so we apply a standardised JATO taxonomy across it all. Think of it as a global data language for vehicle specs, equipment, and option pricing that can be used consistently across markets and brands.
Why does that consistency and transparency matter?
Consumer trust is shaped before the first contact with a retailer. People research online first. So if a vehicle listing lacks transparency, or feels incomplete, or looks like it’s hiding the detail buyers care about, it creates doubt long before a salesperson ever gets a chance to explain.
If you misrepresent a vehicle’s true specification, you can easily underprice or overprice it – whether you’re buying it into stock or selling it retail. And that matters because profit margins are tight and the economics of stocking are real: funding lines, limited forecourt space, the need to turn vehicles quickly. If you’ve overpaid for a car at auction because you assumed it had features it doesn’t have or you’ve undervalued it because you didn’t identify high-value options, you feel that immediately. And if you don’t list and promote the features that genuinely differentiate a car, it can sit longer than it should. Sometimes the car is good – the listing just isn’t telling the story, because the spec detail isn’t accurate or complete.
Then there’s reputational damage and consumer disappointment. If a customer arrives expecting one thing and the car doesn’t have it – or if the vehicle is sold remotely and the description is wrong – that’s when trust breaks down, complaints escalate, and returns become more likely. And finally, there’s operational cost. The market has become incredibly complex. It’s hard for sales teams to stay on top of every trim, every pack, every charging capability, every feature set across legacy OEMs and new entrants but data can help inform them faster which helps them inform customers properly.
Compliance pressure keeps increasing especially with emissions claims, pricing clarity, finance disclosures and vehicle histories. How does that need to be evidenced in listings now?
The consumer protections themselves aren’t new. Where the pressure is really building is in the expectation of structured, standardised, high-integrity information because the market is becoming more digital, more marketplace-driven, and increasingly influenced by automation and AI. Marketplaces and digital platforms want data in consistent formats, a standard structure so that vehicles can be displayed accurately, filtered properly, compared easily and presented in a way that consumers trust. That creates an industry-wide quality expectation – not just a legal requirement.
And of course, dealers aren’t relying on one data source. There are finance quotations, history checks, warranty products, compliance wording – lots of moving parts. Our job is to support the ecosystem with accurate spec and equipment data that helps retailers and platforms reduce risk, reduce errors and improve transparency.
Where does JATO sit in the vehicle listing journey?
Generally, our customers aren’t individual dealers — they’re the inventory management system provider, the website provider, the dealer management system, the platforms that dealers use to run their operation and present stock online. Those providers control the experience. JATO’s role is to provide the richness and accuracy of the vehicle data that supports that journey. More recently, we’ve also developed a product called VINView Pro. It allows a user to enter a registration number or a VIN and immediately obtain the desirable features that were fitted to that vehicle.
VINView Pro is a move toward a more direct dealer solution. In simple terms, it starts with a registration number or a VIN. Then we call up the OEM’s original buildsheet for that vehicle – what was fitted on the car when it was built. We match that to our catalogue and present it back in a very simple view. So a dealer can see: this car cost £30,000 new, but it had £4,000 of optional extras fitted and here are those options. From there, we’ve built in an AI-supported feature that can write an advert description highlighting those additional features so the dealer isn’t relying only on generic data. They can rely on the original factory buildsheet, which is particularly valuable for premium brands where options heavily affect value. VINView Pro helps bring those options together, shows the original cost of those options when the vehicle was new, and helps dealers “merchandise” the vehicle properly today.
What do you mean by “merchandise”?
Listing a car is one thing. Merchandising is about how you sell that car digitally. If you look at the basic process, it hasn’t changed dramatically in years: photos, description, price, calls-to-action. But the shopping behaviour has changed – and expectations have changed. Merchandising means thinking about how features are presented, how the most relevant information is surfaced, how a page layout supports conversion, and how you appeal to different buyer types.
One thing we still see a lot is a massive list of features sorted alphabetically. That isn’t aligned to how people shop. A 25-year-old buying their first hatchback isn’t necessarily making a decision based on ABS and airbags – they’ll assume safety basics exist. They may care more about the sound system, smartphone connectivity, parking tech and driver assistance. I’d urge dealers to challenge how well their vehicle pages convert users. Test different layouts. Test different description styles. Consider richer content like video. Think about comparisons. And try to align the listing journey with the reality of how consumers decide.
We’re not a website design business – that’s for the platform providers – but as a core data provider, we do have a part to play, because better data enables better merchandising.
Do you think many dealers are actively thinking about that right now?
The bigger groups, yes. Smaller dealers tend to rely heavily on their website providers. But if I’m honest, I think some complacency has crept in, and innovation has slowed. During COVID there was an intense focus on online retail capabilities and a lot of energy went into enabling checkout-style features. The industry has largely landed in a sensible omnichannel place – reserve online, buy in store; apply online, collect in store – and that’s great. Now the focus should shift to how well vehicles are promoted: better descriptions, better content, better presentation of the features that matter and better alignment to what different customers actually value. That’s where transparency and conversion come together – and where the next competitive advantage will be.