In the dealership world, the vehicle inventory manager orders vehicles to put on the lot for walk-up customers to buy, if they want to. This is what I term "lot stock". Should the customer want something not on the lot or not "in route" as stock, the desired vehicle would be "special ordered" for the customer from the factory. Whether or not a deposit was put down for the dealer to order the vehicle, that was their determination.
Should the desired vehicle, or one substantially like the desired vehicle, be found at another dealership, then a "dealer trade" might be orchestrated where one dealer swaps a vehicle to the other dealer in order to get the desired vehicle without waiting for it to be built. End result is the sale is made.
That's the "dealership world" I spent 46.5 years in. That's the way it is done in Texas and the states bordering it. The system makes sense. My apologies if that does not align with other parts of the nation. At least in pre-pandemic times and with USA produced vehicles.
I learned in the later 1970s that import brand dealerships had little control over what vehicles they received to sell. The "factory" decided what they would build and send to the dealers. The dealers could determine what vehicles were "in transit" to them, if the customer wanted something different than what was on the lot. This tends to explain why so many import-brand vehicles are mostly the same, other than color. In some cases, they could dealer-trade with other area dealerships.
In the case of Toyota, which has regional presences at "Ports of Entry", Gulf States Toyota for Texas, a dealer could see what was down there and place an order for the particular vehicle. They could also add things like different wheels to the vehicles, NONE of which would be reflected in the vehicle VIN decode.
Regards,
CBODY67
