CarShots vs iPacket

Yes. AutoIPacket, LLC is the company and iPacket is its product. It's based in Williamstown, West Virginia, its website is ipacket.us, and it says about 4,000 dealerships use it. If you searched for AutoIPacket to sign in, the Dealer Login link sits at the top of iPacket's site.

iPacket calls its product a digital vehicle presentation: one page for each car that gathers its original window sticker, its history report and the repair orders from reconditioning. Salespeople send it to shoppers from the CRM or the iPacket Dealer app. Car Pages does the same job inside CarShots, starting from the car's studio photos and walkaround video. Our guide on what an iPacket is covers what a shopper sees in one.

The paperwork answers a shopper's questions, but the photos decide whether they keep scrolling. iPacket's site lists documents, heatmaps and alerts, not photo or video tools.

Every Car Page opens with the studio photos from your CarShots shoot, on the backdrop you picked, and a 15-second 360° walkaround video made from them, with voiceover and music. The window sticker, recalls, history link, price and Buyers Guide come after that, so the car looks its best before anyone reaches the fine print.

This is iPacket's biggest edge. It pulls the original window sticker or build sheet by VIN and says it has 20 million MSRPs from more than 30 automakers, so most new and late-model cars get the real sticker automatically.

A Car Page links the automaker's own copy when the automaker posts it online, or shows the original if you upload it. Otherwise it shows a spec sheet built from the VIN, labeled as a spec sheet, never passed off as the original. With Car Pages Pro, AI reads the stickers you upload and puts what they say on the page. Our free window sticker lookup shows which brands post their stickers. If an original sticker on every car, with nothing to upload, matters most to you, iPacket is the stronger choice.

iPacket loads closed repair orders straight from the dealer's management system: once a day from CDK, DealerTrack, AutoMate, AutoSoft and DealerBuilt, and daily or weekly from Reynolds and Reynolds stores through DealerVault. Only orders closed after the car came into stock show up, with the customer's details left out. Shoppers see what the dealer fixed, which answers the question every used car buyer asks.

Car Pages doesn't connect to your DMS. With Car Pages Pro, you snap a photo of a repair order or upload the PDF, and AI lists the work on the car's page with the customer's name and address hidden. If you want every repair order to arrive on its own, iPacket is the better fit.

Both tools tell a salesperson when a shopper opens a car's page, as long as the shopper got a personal link. iPacket sends live view alerts and shows heatmaps of the parts each shopper spent time on. Its help center tells dealers that the iPacket button on their website is only informational, with no tracking or credit, so salespeople should send each shopper a link of their own.

Car Pages works the same way: share a car with a shopper's name and they get a personal link. Email security filters and link previews open links on their own, so Car Pages leaves those automatic opens out of its counts. Every plan shows each car's views and sends a daily summary email. Car Pages Pro adds who's looking: each shopper's visits by device, the time they spent on each part of the page and how much of the video they watched, with a hot score of Hot, Warm or Browsing, and live alerts by email and text with a suggested reply. It also tells you when a link opens on a second device, a sign the shopper may have passed the car on to someone else.

iPacket doesn't publish its prices. Dealers book a demo and get a quote, and GM dealers can use co-op money on it, since iPacket is an approved turnkey product in GM's iMR program. It doesn't publish its contract terms or a free trial either, so ask about the term and the notice period on the demo.

Car Pages are included with CarShots at $50 a month for 333 photos, month to month, with no setup fee and nothing per page. Car Pages Pro is $149 a month per rooftop, with the same photos included, and adds who's looking, live alerts, CRM leads, a website badge and AI that reads stickers and repair orders. Your first car is free, up to 10 photos with no card, and it gets its own page, so you can send it to a shopper, or to yourself, before you pay anything. Prices are on our pricing page.