Every lead that hits your lot arrives with a fifteen-minute clock on it.
The retail side of DealerStak is built around the part of the day that decides your month: how fast somebody on the floor actually speaks to the person who enquired. Everything after that — desking the deal, the trade, the fees, the Bill of Sale — happens on the same record, in the same platform your store already runs on.
- Leads claimed on the floor, not assigned by a manager
- Retail deal desking with fees and payouts
- Its own retail Bill of Sale
- Switched on per store, gated per person
— LeadBack
Speed to the first phone call is the whole game, so we put a timer on it.
Every dealer principal already believes that a lead answered in minutes is worth more than the same lead answered after lunch. The problem was never the belief. It is that nothing in the store enforces it — a lead lands in an inbox, somebody means to get to it, and by the time anyone does the customer has bought from whoever called back first.
LeadBack does not remind anyone. It takes the lead back. A salesperson claims it, has fifteen minutes to log a real conversation, and if they do not, the lead returns to the floor and everyone is notified again.
Time left to make contact
15:00
Every claimed lead carries this. Under five minutes it turns amber. At zero the lead is not yours any more.
The clock runs around the clock.
There are no quiet hours and no business-hours exemption. A lead claimed at 11:04pm expires at 11:19pm exactly like one claimed at 2pm. That was a decision, not an oversight — a rule with exceptions is a rule your floor will argue with.
What stops it
- A call
- A text
- An email
- In person
Logged by the person who claimed it, with the channel recorded. What does not stop it: opening the lead, reading the lead, or intending to call the lead.
01
The lead lands, everyone hears about it
A marketplace enquiry or a website form arrives and every active staff member is notified at once — in the app and by push on their phone. Accountants are left out of it, and anyone can opt themselves out.
02
First to claim wins
Two people tap at the same instant and exactly one of them gets it; the other is told who beat them. No dispatcher, no round-robin, no lead sitting in a queue waiting for someone to assign it.
03
Fifteen minutes to make contact
The clock starts on the claim. It stops when the salesperson logs a call, a text, an email or an in-person conversation — not when they mark it read, and not when they say they meant to.
04
Miss it and it goes back in the pool
The claim releases automatically and the lead is re-broadcast to the whole floor, carrying a visible “re-opened” count. A lead that keeps bouncing is a staffing problem you can now see.
05
Nothing is quietly forgotten overnight
A lead nobody ever claimed gets one more push in the morning, in your dealership's own timezone, so the 11pm enquiry is on somebody's phone when the lot opens.
— Where they come from, where they go
One inbox for every marketplace you run.
Leads stop being five browser tabs and a forwarded email. They arrive tagged with the channel that sent them, get worked on a clock, and leave a trail you can read at the end of the month.
One intake address per channel
Your store gets its own address for each marketplace you run — AutoTrader, Kijiji Autos, CarGurus, Facebook Marketplace and your own website. You paste it into that marketplace's lead-forwarding setting once.
- Source attribution survives even when the marketplace's own data is missing — the address it arrived on is the answer
- Which channel actually produces business becomes a number instead of an opinion
- Website enquiries land in the same inbox as marketplace ones, not a mailbox nobody reads
Contact logged by channel
When a salesperson makes contact they say how: called, texted, emailed or spoke in person. That is what stops the clock, and it is what builds the trail.
- First-contact timestamp on every lead, recorded once and kept
- A full event trail — claimed, released, re-claimed, contacted, by whom
- How many times a lead was re-opened before someone worked it
It reaches the phone in their pocket
Push notifications go out on the lead itself, not a daily digest. The salesperson taps the notification and lands on that lead, ready to claim.
- Push on arrival, and again every time a lead comes back up for grabs
- Claim, log contact and call the customer from the phone
- Per-person notification opt-out, so the part-timer is not woken at midnight
Marketplace intake is provisioned per dealership and switched on with your account manager. Which channels you connect is your call.
— The finance office
Desk the deal where the vehicle already lives.
The unit is in DealerStak with its cost, its VIN decode and its photos. Desking the retail deal somewhere else means re-typing all of that and then reconciling two versions of the same sale at month end. Here the deal is another record against the vehicle you already own.
The deal terms, held in one place
Selling price, trade allowance, lien payout on the trade, taxes and the products the customer actually took — structured, not typed into a spreadsheet a second time.
- Retail deal terms stored per deal, not per document
- Back-end products recorded against the deal they were sold on
- Trade-in captured against the client record it came from
Lender fee, PPSA and lien payout, tracked
The line items that quietly decide whether a retail deal made money are recorded on the deal rather than remembered by whoever desked it.
- Lender fee and PPSA registration fee held on the deal
- Lien payout on the trade carried through to the numbers
- Credit disclosure recorded with the deal file
What the deal really made
Front, back and the fees together. The store sees the gross after the trade and the payout, which is the only version of the number worth acting on.
- Costs land on the deal as they happen, not at month end
- Salesperson attribution on every deal
- Deal file compliance checks before it closes
A retail Bill of Sale, not a wholesale one
Retail paperwork is its own document with its own disclosures. It is generated from the deal record, so what is on the page is what is in the system.
- Generated as a proper PDF, ready to print or send
- Electronic signature with an expiring signing link
- Stored encrypted, served through short-lived signed links
To be straight about the boundary: DealerStak does not pull credit, does not submit applications to lenders and is not a bureau. It records what your finance office negotiated so it reaches the Bill of Sale, the deal file and the gross without being re-keyed. Anyone telling you they are integrated with every lender in Canada should be asked to show you which ones.
— The floor
Customers, trades and the people who work them.
Clients, not contact rows
A client record that carries the enquiry it started as, the vehicle they asked about, the trade they brought, the deals they signed and the documents attached to each one.
Trade-ins that follow the deal
The trade is appraised against the client and the deal it came from, and its lien payout is part of the deal's numbers rather than a note somebody made on a printout.
Salespeople with their own view
Each salesperson sees their leads, their clients and their deals. Attribution happens because they claimed the lead, not because a manager remembered to type a name.
The website feeds the same inbox
Enquiries from your DealerStak dealer website land in the lead inbox alongside marketplace ones, on the same clock, with the same claim.
— Two switches
Retail is a switch, and so is who gets to see it.
Most dealer software makes you take the whole thing. You buy a retail system and your wholesale desk wades through customer screens it will never use; you buy a wholesale system and there is nowhere sensible to put a retail deal.
DealerStak turns retail on per dealership. A wholesale-only store never sees a lead inbox or a retail deal screen, because for that store it does not exist. Turn it on the month you start retailing and nothing has to be migrated — the inventory, the clients and the documents are already where they need to be.
Then a second, separate permission controls who inside the store gets retail at all. Roles are per user, and the person selling cars does not have to be the person who can see the invoices.
Ask any other vendor what happens to the retail half of their product on a month where you wholesale everything. If the answer is that you pay for it and look at it anyway, that is the answer.
Per store: retail mode
Off by default. A wholesaler sees a wholesale platform with no retail clutter anywhere in it. On when you want it, without a new subscription, a data migration or a second login.
Per person: what a salesperson sees
- The lead inbox, and the clock on anything they claim
- Their clients, their trades, their deals
- Inventory and vehicle detail
- The paperwork for a deal they are closing
Per person: what they do not
- Invoices, expenses and receipts
- The executive dashboard and its export
- Statement imports and reconciliation
- Anything your bookkeeper works in
— Questions retail dealers ask
Including the ones with an awkward answer.
- We only wholesale today. Does the retail side get in the way?
- No. Retail mode is switched on per dealership, so a wholesale-only store never sees a retail menu, a retail deal screen or a lead inbox. When you decide to start retailing, it is a switch rather than a migration — your inventory, your clients and your documents are already there.
- What actually happens if a salesperson claims a lead and does nothing?
- After fifteen minutes the claim releases automatically and the lead goes back up for grabs, with everyone on the floor notified again. The lead carries a visible count of how many times that has happened, so a lead that keeps bouncing shows up as a staffing signal instead of disappearing.
- Does DealerStak pull credit or send applications to lenders?
- No. There is no credit bureau connection and no lender submission. The lender fee, PPSA fee, lien payout and credit disclosure are recorded on the deal so they flow through to the Bill of Sale and to the gross, but the application itself stays wherever you do it today.
- Can my salespeople see the accounting?
- Only if you want them to. Roles and permissions are per user: a salesperson can be given the floor — leads, clients, inventory and deals — without invoices, expenses or the executive dashboard. Retail access is its own permission on top of that.
- Is the retail Bill of Sale different from the wholesale one?
- Yes, they are separate documents. Retail paperwork carries its own disclosures and is generated from the retail deal record; the wholesale Bill of Sale is built for dealer-to-dealer and multi-vehicle deals. Both come out as proper PDFs with electronic signature and both are stored encrypted.
- Do marketplace leads come in automatically, or do we forward them?
- Your store is given its own intake address for each channel you run — AutoTrader, Kijiji Autos, CarGurus, Facebook Marketplace and your website. You paste that address into the marketplace's lead-forwarding setting once, and enquiries from that channel arrive tagged with the channel they came from.
— Most stores do both
If you retail and wholesale, you are the normal case.
Retail and wholesale run on the same inventory, the same documents and the same set of books here. Nothing on this page requires you to choose a side.
Put a clock on your leads and see what the month looks like.
Tell us how many units you retail a month and which marketplaces you advertise on. We will show you what the lead inbox looks like with your channels in it, and what turning retail on would mean for the way your floor works.
Start the conversationBuilt and supported in Alberta by people who run a dealership themselves. Your account manager sets retail up with you.