Salvage yard software compared

Three kinds of software.
One yard.

“Salvage yard software” describes three different products that get shopped for as though they were one. Knowing which layer you are actually buying settles most of the comparison before it starts.

A yard asking which software to buy is usually asking one of three unrelated questions: what should run the business, what should get parts onto marketplaces, and what should sell to the public under the yard's own name. Vendors in all three call themselves salvage yard software, which is how a shortlist ends up containing products that do not compete with each other at all.

So before any feature table is useful, the layers have to come apart.

The three layers

1. The yard management system

Hollander Powerlink · Car-Part Checkmate · Pinnacle Professional

The system of record. It handles vehicle purchasing, dismantling and teardown, cataloguing parts against interchange, stock locations, point of sale, brokering and the reporting the business runs on. Everything else a yard installs reads from it.

This is the layer you change least often, because changing it is a migration of the entire parts catalogue and every workflow around it. Yards typically pick one and stay for years. All three are quoted privately, priced against yard size and feature tier, so a like-for-like number is something only a vendor can give you.

2. The listing layer

Marketplace integrations, listing tools, in-house scripts — and YardWyre

Getting parts out of the yard system and onto a marketplace, then getting the resulting sale back in. Hollander sells e‑Link for this to its own Powerlink customers; other yards use a third-party lister, a part-time employee, or scripts somebody's nephew wrote.

This is the layer with the widest quality spread, because the difference between options here is not really features. It is whether the listing is built from the record the yard already keeps or retyped by a person — which decides how many of your parts ever get listed at all.

3. The storefront

Your own website, an eBay Store, a marketplace profile

Selling to the public under your own name, rather than through somebody else's search results. A storefront is a shop window onto inventory the other two layers already manage; it does not replace either.

Worth having, and worth having last. A storefront on top of a catalogue that is not being maintained is a website nobody visits twice.

Comparing the listing layer

Layer one is a long procurement with a salesperson, and layer three is mostly a web project. Layer two is where a yard has a real, reversible choice this month, so it is the one worth a table.

The rows below are the questions that actually change the outcome. The columns are approaches rather than brand names, deliberately — see the note under the table.

How the listing layer is usually handled, and what each approach costs in practice.
The question Listing by hand Scripts built in-house YardWyre
Where does the listing data come from? Retyped from the yard system into a marketplace form. Read from the yard database, to whatever depth the script got finished. Read from the existing Powerlink database. Nothing is retyped.
How is eBay fitment built? By hand, if at all. A part fitting forty vehicles is forty rows, so it is usually skipped. Depends entirely on whether interchange was wired in. Generated from the interchange record already attached to the part.
What happens when a part sells? Someone reads the eBay order and keys a work order. Usually nothing — inbound is harder than outbound and often never gets built. The paid order is written back as a work order in the yard system.
What does one more listing cost? Several minutes of someone's time, every time. Near zero once written — but the writing and the upkeep are the cost. Near zero, which is what makes low-value parts worth listing.
Who fixes it when eBay changes? Nobody needs to; a person absorbs the change. You do. Marketplace APIs change on their schedule, not yours. We do, as part of the service.
Is the price public? Wages. Developer time, which is rarely counted honestly. Yes — published in full.

Why no vendor names in the table. We would have to fill in cells about other companies' products from the outside, and a competitor comparison written by one of the competitors is worth exactly what you would expect. The approaches above are ones any yard can verify against its own operation. For what a specific vendor does, ask that vendor — and ask them the six questions in the left-hand column.

How to tell which layer you are shopping for

  • You are still tracking parts on a whiteboard or a spreadsheet. You are shopping for layer one. Nothing in layers two or three will help until there is a parts database to read. Talk to the yard management vendors, and expect a project rather than a purchase.
  • You have a yard system, and a fraction of your inventory is listed anywhere. You are shopping for layer two. The bottleneck is the cost of producing a listing, and that is a solvable problem.
  • You are listed and selling, but only ever through somebody else's marketplace. You are shopping for layer three, and the question is margin rather than volume.
  • Your yard system genuinely cannot do the job any more. This is the expensive one, and worth being certain about. A migration costs months. Confirm the limit is the system itself and not the listing layer bolted to it, because replacing a whole yard management system to fix an eBay problem is a large solution to a small question.

Where YardWyre fits, and where it does not

YardWyre is layer two. It reads the parts database a yard already runs, publishes to eBay Motors with fitment built from interchange and the yard's own photographs, and writes paid orders back as work orders. There is no migration and no second inventory to keep in step.

The limits are worth stating as plainly as the capabilities:

  • It is not a yard management system. It does not run purchasing, dismantling or point of sale, and it will not replace Powerlink, Checkmate or Pinnacle. It needs one of them underneath it.
  • It works with Hollander Powerlink today. A yard running Checkmate or Pinnacle cannot use it as it stands. If that is you, tell us — it changes what we build next, but it is not something to wait on.
  • If you list only a few high-value parts, the arithmetic is weaker. The gain is in the long tail: the thousands of parts where a few minutes of typing costs more than the part earns. A yard already listing everything it wants to list is buying convenience rather than revenue.

Common questions

Is YardWyre a yard management system? No. YardWyre is a listing layer that sits on top of a yard management system. It reads the parts database the yard already runs and publishes to eBay Motors from it. A yard with no yard management system needs one of those first.

Do I have to replace Hollander Powerlink to use YardWyre? No. YardWyre is built to read and write an existing Hollander Powerlink database. There is no migration and no second inventory to keep in step.

Does YardWyre work with Checkmate or Pinnacle? Not today. YardWyre currently supports Hollander Powerlink only. A yard running Checkmate or Pinnacle cannot use it as it stands.

What does salvage yard software cost? Yard management systems are quoted privately by each vendor and vary with yard size and feature tier. YardWyre publishes its own prices in full on the pricing page: a one-time setup fee, a percentage of eBay sales, a charge per feature switched on plus a monthly fee per feature after that, and a per-decode fee for VIN and plate lookups.

See how it works

See it on your own parts

We will take a copy of your inventory and show you what would list, what it would price at, and what the fitment would say.

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