What Copart sells
Copart is one of the largest online vehicle auctions in North America. Most of its stock comes from insurers, which sell cars they have written off after an accident, a flood or a theft. Banks, rental fleets, dealers and private owners sell there too.
That makes Copart a main supplier for importers in Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, for body shops and for dismantlers. All of them need the same thing before they bid: reliable data about the car, in time.
What a Copart lot contains
A lot in the API is one car offered at one sale. Its record keeps everything the lot page shows, in fixed fields you can rely on:
- VIN, make, model, generation, year, engine, fuel, transmission and drive
- Primary and secondary damage, airbags, keys and the run-and-drive condition
- Title type and state, odometer in miles and kilometres
- Yard, city and state, with coordinates for a map
- Sale date, current bid, Buy Now price and the seller reserve when Copart shows it
- The full photo gallery in several sizes, plus video and the 360° view when present
Keep a live copy without scraping
Scraping Copart pages breaks every time the site changes and gets blocked as soon as the volume grows. With the API you load the stock once and then ask, every few minutes, only for the lots that changed: new lots, new bids, new sale dates.
The sync guide shows the loop step by step. Sold lots leave the active list and move to the archive with their final bid, so your copy never shows a car as available after its sale.
Current bid, Buy Now, reserve and final bid
These four numbers are easy to mix up. The current bid is the highest bid while the lot is open. Buy Now is a fixed price at which some lots can be bought before the sale. The seller reserve, when Copart shows it, is the minimum the seller hopes for: it is not a price anyone paid.
The final bid is the highest bid when bidding closed. It is the best answer to the question of what a car is worth, and the final prices guide explains how to use it.
Copart and IAAI in one format
Most buyers watch both big US auctions. Through MotorAPIs, IAAI lots arrive in exactly the same record as Copart lots, so one parser and one database table handle both, and a search can cover both at once.
What the API does not do
MotorAPIs is a data API. It does not place bids, does not buy cars and does not replace a Copart membership or a broker. You decide on the data, then bid on Copart the way you do today.