Car value check on website

[Leekent 2]

Hi, I was wondering if any of you know of how to get a value checker on your website like “we buy any car” and similar? Cheers 

Edited May 16, 2020 by Leekent

[J.B 19]

Very deep pockets or a mate who’s very good at coding and just regular deep pockets I’d imagine 

[Paul C 75]

You'd need 2 main things:

1. A cap-hpi subscription, with the relevant access to used car valuations. I'd imagine you'd also want to be able to lookup by VRM, instead of/as well as make/model etc. CAP don't publish prices online but there is some info here and an enquiry number: https://www.cap-hpi.com/products-and-services

2. A website which is designed to look pretty at the front end and can communicate in the background with the CAP HPI webservice. There's a bunch of documentation online: https://developer.cap.co.uk/webservices Typically this is bread & butter work for a web developer but obviously they'd need to be given a fairly accurate description/specification of the work. I'd also strongly recommend they're involved in deciding which type/features you sign up for in the cap-hpi subscription, since there may be other things of interest which you'd want to incorporate; or alternatively, you could just offer something basic and slim down costs as much as possible there too.

[MarkTVS 209]

And if you get it working don’t tell any of us your website address or we’ll rip the hole out of the free valuations to save us paying a cap subscription 

[New year revolutions...... 197]

1 hour ago, MarkTVS said:

And if you get it working don’t tell any of us your website address or we’ll rip the hole out of the free valuations to save us paying a cap subscription 

or the page will constantly crash as tyrones chain hits the screen

[Boycie 30]

4 minutes ago, New year revolutions...... said:

or the page will constantly crash as tyrones chain hits the screen

Could you retype this message in English please?

[Paul C 75]

If that's a concern then you could use some kind of technique to limit the number of enquiries, ie limit per day, or per IP address, or per email address. And/or use a CAPCHCA to prevent someone else screen scraping your paid-for service.

No method is perfect but it would dissuade casual attacks such as the above. The trick is to find a solution which isn't intrusive to the people you want to give the info to, but prevents abuse. No doubt CAP-HPI have an overall throttle anyway.

[New year revolutions...... 197]

28 minutes ago, Paul C said:

If that's a concern then you could use some kind of technique to limit the number of enquiries, ie limit per day, or per IP address, or per email address. And/or use a CAPCHCA to prevent someone else screen scraping your paid-for service.

No method is perfect but it would dissuade casual attacks such as the above. The trick is to find a solution which isn't intrusive to the people you want to give the info to, but prevents abuse. No doubt CAP-HPI have an overall throttle anyway.

it's getting more complicated with every layer

we just need linglong to do the gif work now

[Paul C 75]

Yes, it can get a bit cat & mouse, but that's part of the fun isn't it?

[New year revolutions...... 197]

2 minutes ago, Paul C said:

Yes, it can get a bit cat & mouse, but that's part of the fun isn't it?

yes yes

[Paul C 75]

In reality, you'd not "reinvent the wheel" over and over, there's companies who sell web platforms which can do this kind of thing. They would keep abreast of any exploits and issue (and probably apply or auto apply) patches to stop them. You'd only need to develop your own website if you wanted something sufficiently custom which couldn't be found "off the shelf".

[trade vet 703]

1 hour ago, Paul C said:

In reality, you'd not "reinvent the wheel" over and over, there's companies who sell web platforms which can do this kind of thing. They would keep abreast of any exploits and issue (and probably apply or auto apply) patches to stop them. You'd only need to develop your own website if you wanted something sufficiently custom which couldn't be found "off the shelf".

I tried this 2 years ago,it is not easy.I found that all these digital/web people talk a good game and then want to lock you into long term contracts.Then you find out they can’t deliver unless you pay them more money.Even HPI offered a great discount contract for X number of searches and valuations per month so I went along with it.I had another account with them for 40 years so compared statements and discovered that the new account was costing far more than the old one.Click Dealer promised that they employed the best SEO code guys,it took nearly 6 months to make the site work.I think they may have been subcontracting  the coding stuff to somewhere far off.

So good luck.