Prepare
The agent asks for purpose, channels, and data categories. No name, email, or phone is sent.
The boundary
Inventory feeds, pricing policies, incentive data, and authoritative availability remain behind dealer policy. The gateway publishes only the fields needed to answer vehicle-shopping questions. It is not generic access to your DMS, CRM, customer records, desking, lender decisions, or contracts.
Used-vehicle evidence stays separated
A used unit can include current mileage, stocked date, first public listing date, history-report references, title, inspection, certification, warranty, and dealer-approved reconditioning facts. CARFAX, AutoCheck, and other reports retain separate sources and timestamps. If they disagree, the gateway exposes the discrepancy instead of manufacturing a cleaner answer.
Inventory age is dated evidence. An answer says how many complete days the unit has been in dealer inventory, the as-of time, and whether the clock began at stocking or first public listing.
Customer data enters through one door
Disclose
The gateway returns the exact disclosure and an ES256-signed, expiring, single-use binding.
Consent
The buyer sees the disclosure and chooses whether to continue.
Deliver
The gateway verifies every binding condition, then emits one tagged ADF lead.
Failed verification means nothing is stored and nothing is forwarded. Binding tokens and contact data never appear in URLs, logs, metrics, errors, cursors, or cache keys.
Open standard, hosted product
Dealer Agent Protocol defines the portable tools, schemas, and conformance tests. DealershipMCP is one commercial implementation from Dealer Growth Hackers. Other vendors can implement the same Apache-2.0 standard.