Real-time inventory sync means your website never lags behind your active showroom.
The old way: a unit arrives in back Tuesday morning and doesn’t show up on your site until the next overnight batch update, so a customer who would have called about it today calls somewhere else instead. Or a unit sells and stays live online for another day, taking calls on something that’s already gone. That gap exists because most websites check inventory once a day, sometimes less, and today’s shopper won’t wait until tomorrow to see if a unit is still there.
The new way: Dealer Spike and Lightspeed built a webhook to achieve a real-time connection that closes that gap entirely. A traditional integration relies on your website periodically checking in with the DMS to ask if anything changed. A webhook flips that: instead of your site asking, Lightspeed tells your site when something happens.
Already on Lightspeed? This is already headed your way. If you have an existing parts and unit inventory 3PA key, real-time sync is rolling out to you automatically at no additional cost. Nothing to set up on your end. Want to be among the first to get it? Sign up here.
Not on Lightspeed yet? Here’s why dealers are making the move. Within the Lightspeed ecosystem, Dealer Spike is the first website partner to offer a real-time DMS sync like this, keeping your inventory accurate within minutes instead of once a day. If your site still runs on daily batch updates, ask your Dealer Spike account team what switching to Lightspeed would mean for you.
Dealer Spike is the first website provider to offer this real-time sync.
Ted Kerkam, Lightspeed’s Director of Product Management, put it simply on the What’s New at Dealer Spike webinar: Dealer Spike is the first website provider to partner with Lightspeed on this. That’s worth pausing on. Lightspeed runs the DMS behind more than 4,500 dealers across powersports, marine, RV, and golf, and a real-time connection into a system that central takes real cooperation, engineering time, and trust from the DMS partner, not something a website provider ships alone.
Andy Korolenko, Dealer Spike’s Senior Manager of Partnerships, sees the same pattern in nearly every integration he works on:
The biggest thing I see with integrations is the constant request for faster updates. It’s always, ‘Great, we’ve got once-a-day updates — how do we get to every three hours? How do we get to once an hour?’ Real-time skips past all of that.”
Andy Korolenko, Senior Manager, Partnerships, Dealer Spike
Very few partnerships have the resources to make that leap directly. Getting there took two things being true at once: Lightspeed having the technical depth to build something this capable, and enough shared dealers to justify the investment on both sides. That overlap is real: 70% of Dealer Spike customers with a DMS integration run Lightspeed, backed by years of partnership between our teams. You can read more about the full partnership on our Better Together page.
Here’s exactly what changes for your inventory.
Ted explained it plainly on the webinar: Webhooks removes the polling and creates a real-time integration between Dealer Spike and Lightspeed. Take receipt of a unit and load it into Lightspeed, and it shows up on your website immediately. Sell a unit, and it comes down immediately, at no additional cost for Lightspeed customers with an existing 3PA key. Once enabled, it runs itself:
Once webhooks are enabled, they actively scan for changes in the dealer inventory and make sure that those get posted. So you can always manually push if you want to, but Webhooks will be sort of the always-on solution for inventory updating online.”
Ted Kerkam, Director of Product Management, Lightspeed
That accuracy pays off beyond your leads, too. Search engines and AI assistants increasingly favor sites with current, accurate listings, and treat outdated inventory as a signal to rank lower. A site that reflects real inventory in real time has a real edge over a competitor whose listings lag a day behind.
Real-time sync is rolling out now — don’t wait to get started. Sign up below to lock in first access.
What’s coming next.
Real-time inventory sync is the biggest thing Dealer Spike and Lightspeed have shipped together so far, but it’s not the last. Next up is a text widget that captures sales, parts, service, and rental leads directly into your Lightspeed CRM, with no double entry and no new number to manage since it runs on your existing Twilio account. It’s still in development, targeted for general availability this summer.
That’s one piece of a longer list of projects the two teams are working through together. As Andy puts it, “There’s just so much in the works right now.”
See the full partnership.
Watch Ted Kerkam and our team cover both real-time sync and a preview of the upcoming text widget live in the webinar.
