Right Hand DMS — the auction yard, read in English.
A dealer management system for shops that import JDM cars and kei trucks from Japanese auto auctions. It started as one importer’s cost spreadsheet and grew into a multi-tenant product: it searches every auction agent a dealer already has a login for, reads the handwritten Japanese auction sheet, prices the lot from real sold comps, runs standing hunts for customers, and adds up what each car actually cost to land — from the paperwork, not from guesses. No WordPress anywhere: a custom Go backend and React front end, built hand-in-hand with AI.
The brief
An importer’s morning used to be three agent websites open in tabs running the same search, a Japanese auction sheet with a coded damage map and handwritten inspector notes, an inbox full of customers asking for updates, and a dozen PDFs — auction invoice, Wise transfer, customs broker, CBP 7501, port, trucking, title — that nobody totals until months after the car is bought. Off-the-shelf dealer software assumes you buy at a domestic lot. Nothing understood Japanese auctions, frame numbers instead of VINs, or the 25-year import rule.
The approach
- One search across JapanCarDirect, JDM Auc, and Pacific Coast JDM, driven by each dealer’s own logins through headless-browser scrapers — behind a rate limiter and circuit breaker so a slow or angry auction site never takes the app down with it.
- AI auction-sheet translation with Claude Vision: overall, interior, and exterior grades, mileage, the damage-map codes, inspector comments, and the full frame number (車台番号) — with a confidence flag so a misread is easy to correct.
- Price guidance grounded in what comparable lots actually sold for at auction, from the sold prices the scrapers already collect — not a made-up formula.
- Hunts: standing searches that run on a schedule, read and price every match, email the agent for a missing sheet, and draft a customer shortlist in the dealer’s own voice — sent from their own Fastmail or Gmail only after they approve it.
- Landed cost from the paperwork: drop in the invoices and receipts and every line is extracted, added up per car, and linked back to the document it came from. One car record carries a lot from watchlist to bid to won to sold, with profit at the end.
- Built as a real product, not a demo — tenant-isolated accounts, every auction login and mailbox token encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, per-user AI usage metering, a buf/Connect RPC contract shared by the Go server and React client, and an end-to-end browser suite gating every deploy.
“Buy JDM cars at auction without the guesswork.”
— Right Hand DMS
The outcome
A dealer runs one search instead of three, reads a sheet in seconds instead of waiting on a translator, and knows what a truck cost by the time it’s titled instead of months later. Customers get shortlists without having to chase them, written in the dealer’s words. And because the whole thing is custom code rather than plugins, every part of it — the scrapers, the sheet reader, the cost ledger — bends to how JDM importers actually work.