Dealerships across the country have come under intense scrutiny in the wake of several Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuits, raising the question: are they truly engaging in deceptive practices, or is something else at play?

In my experience working with automotive retailers, I’ve found that most dealers are honest businesspeople trying to stay competitive in a volatile market. The challenge often isn’t willful deception. Usually, it’s a fragmented technology ecosystem with too many vendors, all pushing separate agendas, that ultimately leads to conflicting ads and misunderstood pricing.

Before we indict an entire industry, let’s explore how this situation came to be, and how we can fix it.

Untangling Vendor Overlap to Eliminate Confusing Ads

To the average consumer, a dealership’s advertising might seem all over the place—ads tout one monthly payment, while the website banner claims another. But these inconsistencies typically aren’t due to malicious intent. More often, they stem from the fact that a single dealership may have eight to ten different companies handling their advertising.

One vendor manages Google ads, another handles social media campaigns, a third produces video content, a fourth drives email marketing, a fifth runs direct mail, and yet another is in charge of the dealership’s main website. On top of that, the website itself may have three or four separate vendors feeding content, widgets, pricing, or special offers into different sections of the platform.

In an ideal world, all these pieces would sync up perfectly—if the price changes or a special expires, every vendor and channel would update instantly. Unfortunately, that’s rarely how it works. None of these companies typically integrate with each other in real time. Discrepancies arise because each vendor has its own data sources, timelines, and processes.

One vendor might update an offer, while another vendor’s system still lists the old price. Or a social media campaign might lag behind the real pricing changes that happened last week. The result is a patchwork of ads and promotions that paint a confusing, sometimes contradictory picture for car shoppers.

From my vantage point, these jumbled messages are almost always “best-case scenarios” for customers, which means they’re not usually inflated pricing or hidden fees but rather an outdated special that is no longer valid or a missed disclaimer about who qualifies for an advertised price. Naturally, consumers see these discrepancies and wonder whether they’re being intentionally misled. In truth, many dealership teams are losing sleep trying to reconcile their vendors’ data streams, only to find that the next update (from yet another partner) has created a whole new conflict. It’s a vicious cycle that can severely damage a dealership’s reputation through customer distrust and legal consequences.

Streamlining Dealership Pricing with Centralized Offer Management

Given the constant changes in bank rates, manufacturer incentives, and internal dealership pricing strategies, it’s easy to see how a purely manual approach to updates becomes unsustainable. This is why I firmly believe in adopting a streamlined technology solution that consolidates a dealership’s entire marketing and advertising ecosystem into a single source of truth.

At the heart of this approach is an offer management system. This system is responsible for taking the dealership’s inventory—every vehicle on the lot—and updating each car’s advertised price and payment at least twice daily. In other words, it automatically ingests updated incentives, rebates, and lending rates and pushes these accurate figures across every channel the dealership uses, especially on its website, social media, and Google ads.

Why does this matter? Simple: consistency is everything. When a dealership employs eight or nine different vendors without a unifying system, each vendor might be pulling from a slightly different data set or from an older data file that’s already out of date. With a modern offer management platform, the dealership can centrally dictate the correct price, monthly payment, and disclaimers only once, and every partner pulls from that same updated source.

Having a central platform also covers legal compliance. Proper disclaimers that meet federal, state, and OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) requirements can be baked into each offer automatically rather than relying on manual updates from multiple vendors. Prices that appear on the website or in an ad are derived from realistic data fed by actual banks. When the lease payment changes, it’s because the current month’s lending rates or incentives have shifted, not because someone made a mistake or tried to inflate the payment.

This level of built-in compliance ensures the dealership avoids running afoul of consumer protection laws or attracting regulatory scrutiny. If the dealership has partnered with a specific bank offering a promotional interest rate, that data is instantly factored into the lease payment shown across every advertising channel. It’s the same when incentives expire or new ones are announced.

Fixing the Tech Disconnect to Build Trust in Automotive Retail

Whether it’s a legacy software issue, poor communication among third-party agencies, or a lack of real-time integration, the current technology ecosystem in automotive retail can inadvertently create confusion and distrust for consumers. While certain regional players may have willfully stepped over the line, I’ve found that the vast majority of dealerships just want to be transparent. They see repeat business and solid community standing as far more valuable than short-term gains from misleading offers.

Dealers aren’t inherently deceptive. Most are just swept up in a broken technology network that they don’t fully control. The solution is better integration and a genuine commitment to consistent, accurate communication. Through forward-thinking strategies and integrated tech, we can restore trust in the automotive retail process and ensure customers have a clear, fair understanding of what they’re paying for.

After all, that’s the kind of transparency both consumers and dealerships need to thrive in today’s market.