A quick way to check your order status on COTUS

[peetucket]

I got tired of visiting the COTUS page, and re-entering my order info each time. Even with browser auto-fill, it is just not good enough. There should be a page you can bookmark that saves your order info and gives you an update when you visit it.

So since I am a developer/sw engineer type, I created one yesterday:

http://j.mp/mustang-checker

Plug in your order info just like in COTUS and you will get a mini-update with some of the info I was able to scrape from the COTUS website. The advantage over cotus is that (1) if you get the "order not found" crap (~50% of the time in my experience), you can just refresh the page to try again, (2) you can bookmark the page and come back to it later without having to enter your info again.

None of your order info is ever saved in this app - it just posts it onto Ford and parses the response.

EDIT: full disclosure, your order info will be temporarily saved in a log file on the Heroku server. I am not saving the log files so they will be deleted automatically. Keep in mind that since the requests you make to Ford (even on their COTUS site itself) are not encrypted, anyone who intercepts your web traffic has it too. Not a biggie since there isn't really any sensitive info there but just FYI.


I hope it works for you!

Caveats:

1. Not all info is there and what is there is subject to break if Ford ever changes the site. I am basically reading their webpage and scraping bits off of it to display. It is brittle.

2. I only had my one car to test with. It works for me, it might not work for you.

3. It is deployed to a free web hosting service (Heroku). I hope there will not be enough traffic to kill it, but it may get shut down if we exceed their free usage level. Don't refresh 100 times a hour, it won't make your car appear any faster!

4. The (lack of) design will remind you of the Internet from the mid 1990s if you are that old. I may add some "under construction" gifs or firepots.

5. There is very little error checking code, so if things break you may get a technical looking error message.

Technical details for those that are interested:

1. It is a simple Rails app that just posts your order info to COTUS, and then parses the HTML response with nokogiri. If they change anything (class names, javascript, etc.) it will definitely break.

2. There is no API that I am aware of unfortunately.

3. It is deployed to Heroku free tier.

4. If anyone I worked with found a 50% error rate acceptable, I would find another job.

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[Coaster]

Works for me.

Only thing I see missing that would be nice is a link to the window sticker. Since you have the VIN that should be easy.

 

[peetucket]

1. Added a link to the window sticker if there is a VIN (unless you are still "in order processing").

2. Dropped in an "under construction" animated gif.

3. Hiding VIN, estimated delivery date, and days left if they are blank.

 

[DarthLepard]

Ok, just used it and thank you so much for this. But I do have a quick question, I don't know, maybe I should create an new thread, let me know.

So mine us showing "In Order Processing" but it is showing me a VIN number now where it did not before. I thought we couldn't see a VIN until it went into "In Production"? And when I go to Cotus I don't have a link to the window sticker? And no listed build week?

Thanks for any insight

 

[peetucket]

Not sure - my order showed a VIN very quickly, even when it was still "In order processing". I don't have a window sticker yet though.

If shown in the app, the VIN has to be on the COTUS page somewhere, since I am just scraping the data from the same COTUS page that you can see. Maybe they are hiding it from view in COTUS even though it is assigned and in the HTML code itself?

 

[seivwrig]

Ok, just used it and thank you so much for this. But I do have a quick question, I don't know, maybe I should create an new thread, let me know.

So mine us showing "In Order Processing" but it is showing me a VIN number now where it did not before. I thought we couldn't see a VIN until it went into "In Production"? And when I go to Cotus I don't have a link to the window sticker? And no listed build week?

Thanks for any insight

You can contact FordService (Jeff and Nick) to get your build week. Your vehicle will go into production about a week before your blend date. You will see your window sticker about a day or two after it goes into production.

 

[DarthLepard]

Thanks for the replies.

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