Auto dealers
Every dealer on your map is a separate business that thinks the enquiry is theirs.
Show buyers the franchised dealers, service-only sites and approved bodyshops that carry your marque, with the right department attached to each.
Bring your location data
CSV import, Google Sheets sync or dashboard edits.
Shape the visitor journey
Search, filters, hours, directions and custom actions.
Match your site
85+ available settings, markers and provider map styles.
What your network looks like
Franchised dealer groups holding one or several marques, each an independent company with a signed sales area, plus service-only sites, approved bodyshops and used-car outlets trading under the same badge.
Why a generic map falls short
A dealer holds a sales area, not a radius. Sorting purely by straight-line distance hands an enquiry to whoever happens to be nearest across a boundary, and that is not a bad search result, it is a channel conflict between two businesses that both pay into the same brand's marketing fund and both escalate it to you.
What visitors need to do
- Separate new sales, used sales, servicing and bodyshop work, because one site rarely does all four
- Show which marques a group actually holds the franchise for when the group sells five badges from one forecourt
- Service department hours, which open earlier and close earlier than the showroom
- A phone number and enquiry link that reaches the dealer's own team, not head office
How Handled covers it
- Postcode territories per dealer. Paste the postcodes out of the agreement, exclude the ones that belong to someone else, and publish: an address inside that patch resolves to the dealer who holds it instead of to whoever happens to be nearest. Where two dealers overlap, a rank number you set decides, ahead of how specific or how small either territory is
- An optional enquiry form that routes to the dealer who owns the address. The visitor does not pick a dealer from a list: the enquiry goes to the territory owner, then to a fallback site you name, then to the nearest, and the dealer is emailed the reason they were chosen and a link that marks it handled without a login
- Filterable tags per site for marque, new, used, servicing, parts and bodyshop
- Opening hours per site with live open and closing-soon status, so the service department's hours are the ones a visitor sees
- Priority ordering with a radius beyond which it stops applying, so a flagship group never outranks the dealer across the road from the visitor
- Custom fields for dealer code, group name and franchise start date, and per-site action buttons for booking a test drive or a service
Not every auto dealers business is the same
Single-site family dealers
One marque, one forecourt, an owner who is in the building. Most of the money is in the workshop rather than new cars, so the number on the pin needs to reach the service desk. These sites have little web presence of their own, which makes the manufacturer's map their main source of local demand, and it makes being outranked by a group's flagship site twenty miles away a real loss rather than a cosmetic one.
Multi-marque dealer groups
A dozen sites and five or six badges, with some sites holding two franchises and others holding none because they are service only. A visitor searching one marque should see only the sites that hold that franchise, not everything the group owns. Group structure also changes faster than the website: sites are bought, sold and rebadged, and the map is usually the last thing anyone updates.
Service-only authorised repairers
Aftersales sites with no showroom and no stock. They open earlier than the sales floor, close before it, and often work Saturday mornings the showroom does not. Listed as an ordinary dealer they take sales calls they cannot answer and lose service bookings to sites that are further away, so the useful entry says plainly that this site fixes cars and does not sell them.
Approved bodyshops and used-car outlets
Accident repair centres are approved per manufacturer, often for specific methods such as aluminium bodies or high-voltage battery work, and they are searched for by insurers and drivers rather than by buyers. Used-car outlets trade under the badge with no new stock at all. Both belong on the map and neither belongs in the same list as a new car showroom.
Setting it up
1. List sites, not companies
A group is not a pin. Take the franchise register or the DMS export and turn it into one entry per trading address, so a site that sells and services becomes one pin with several tags, and a group's separate service centre across town becomes its own. The group's website is the wrong source here, because it lists brands and departments rather than doors.
2. Tag by marque and by department
Every site gets the marques it actually holds the franchise for, plus new, used, servicing, parts and bodyshop. That is the filter a visitor uses first, and it is the thing that stops a service-only site fielding new car enquiries. Include approvals worth searching on, such as EV or commercial vehicle work, as their own tags.
3. Publish the hours that answer the call
Each site holds one set of opening hours, so use the department a visitor is most likely to be ringing, which for most sites is service. Put the showroom hours in a custom field on the card underneath. A dealer whose workshop opens at half seven and whose showroom opens at nine will lose bookings if the map shows nine.
4. Point every action at the dealer
Each site's phone number, booking link and test drive request goes to that dealer's own team through per-site action buttons. Hold the dealer code, group name and franchise start date in custom fields so your network team can reconcile the map against the register without opening two systems.
5. Read the unmet demand rate after a month
The analytics page reports the rate of searches that returned nothing. On a dealer network that is a map of where your coverage has a hole, where a site closed and nobody said, and where visitors are searching a marque you did not tag. It is the one number worth putting in front of the network team.
What to prepare before you publish
You do not need a perfect data system to start. A clean first list is enough to test the visitor journey, then you can keep it current from the workflow that suits your team.
- Location name and address
- Phone, website or booking link
- Categories, products or services
- Opening hours and special hours
- A map provider key
- The page where the locator will be embedded
What a territory decides, and where it stops
This is the question a dealer network asks in the first sales call, so here is the whole of the answer before the trial. Territories work: postcodes are assigned to a dealer, an entry ending in an asterisk covers a whole district, an exclude rule carves out what belongs to someone else, overlaps are settled by a rank number you control rather than by geometry, and nothing changes for a visitor until you publish. Four modes decide how hard it lands. Off ranks by distance as before, Preferred pins the owning dealer at the top and keeps the rest of the network listed, Exclusive shows only the owner for an address inside their patch, and Fallback shows the owner only when the ordinary search found nothing, which can add a result and never removes one. Enquiries are routed too, if you switch the form on: the visitor never picks the dealer, the server sends it to the territory owner, then to a fallback site you name, then to the nearest, and the dealer is emailed with the reason they were chosen and a link that marks it handled without an account. Three limits are worth knowing before you sign. A postcode territory decides a search only when the visitor typed an address, since a browser location, the approximate position on page load and an autocomplete pick all arrive as coordinates with no postcode and fall back to distance. A county, a state or a shape drawn on a map cannot be authored here: the engine resolves such rules, but nothing in the dashboard creates one and no boundary data is loaded outside the United States. And a lead stops with the email and the Leads list. There is no webhook, no CRM push and no dealer portal, so if the enquiry has to arrive inside the system your channel team already runs, that part is still yours to build.
Questions we get asked
Can Handled route an enquiry to the dealer whose sales territory covers the customer?
Yes. Switch on the enquiry form and a visitor can send their details from the locator after they search. They are not shown a list of dealers to pick from, which is the behaviour that causes the argument in the first place: the server routes the enquiry to the dealer whose published territory covers the address, then to a fallback site you name, then to the nearest. The dealer is emailed with the customer's details and a plain sentence saying why it came to them, a reply goes straight to the customer, and they can mark it handled from a link in that email without an account. Every enquiry is listed in your dashboard with the territory that routed it. What it does not do is deliver that lead into a CRM: there is no webhook and no push, so the record lives in the dealer's inbox and in Handled.
Can each dealer be given the postcodes from their agreement?
Yes. Paste them as a spreadsheet column, a comma list or a paragraph, add an exclude rule for any that belong to someone else, and publish. Editing changes nothing for visitors until you publish. Where two dealers overlap, a rank number you set decides, lower wins, and it is read before how specific or how small a territory is, so an intentional overlap does not need the lists redrawn. A test box in the dashboard names the owner of any address, every territory that also covered it, and the exact rule that decided. An entry ending in an asterisk covers a district rather than a single code, so 750* or SW1A* takes a whole outward code without listing what is inside it. Two things it does not cover yet: a county or a state cannot be picked by name in the dashboard, and only a typed address search carries a postcode, so a browser location or an autocomplete pick still ranks by distance.
How do we stop a service-only authorised repairer being sent new car enquiries?
Tag each site with what it actually does: new, used, servicing, parts and bodyshop. The visitor filters on the department before distance, and the card says plainly that the site fixes cars and does not sell them, so the number on the pin reaches the service desk rather than a sales floor that does not exist there.
Can one forecourt show several marques while a search for one marque hides the rest?
Yes. Marque is a tag, a site holds as many as it has franchises for, and the visitor filter matches any or all of them. A group selling five badges from one address appears once, and a search for a single marque returns only the sites that actually hold that franchise rather than everything the group owns.
What happens on the map when a dealership is bought by another group?
You change the site record: name, phone, booking links, and the dealer code and group name held in custom fields. Where the network team keeps the franchise register in a Google Sheet, the sync proposes the change and shows it as a reviewed diff before it goes live. The pin stays, the ownership behind it moves, and no enquiry keeps pointing at the previous owner.
Should a dealer pin show showroom hours or workshop hours?
Each site holds one set of opening hours with live open and closing-soon status, so use the department most visitors are ringing, which across a dealer network is usually service. Put the showroom hours in a custom field shown underneath. A workshop that opens at half seven loses bookings if the map says nine.
How much does a dealer locator cost for a national dealer network?
Plans start at $19 a month for up to 200 sites, with $39 and $79 covering 2,000 and 10,000 locations for larger networks. There is a 7 day free trial that takes no card, and no free plan once it ends. You bring your own Mapbox or Google Maps key, so map usage is billed to you by the provider at their rates rather than marked up by us.
If you need something that is not here
Handled is small enough to build to order. If your trade needs a field, a filter or a behaviour the locator does not have yet, say so and we will tell you honestly whether it is a week away or not something we will do.