This is a technical document for the carsales.com Ltd Third Party Lead Service (TPLS). The
TPLS provided by carsales.com Ltd is in the form of a RESTful web based API that allows approved
third parties to integrate their leads with the Autogate Platform.
This document is provided for technical information only, and does not constitute a contractual
arrangement.
Surprisingly this question gets asked more frequently than one would desire. Best place to learn about RESTful web APIs is to have a read of this article provided by Wikipedia.
No, the only format supported is that documented. You can submit in either XML (use Content-type: application/xml) or JSON (use Content-type: application/json).
The two options are basic authorization using the HTTP standard (using the Authorization: basic/xxxx header) or by including username and password on the URI.
Basic 'authorization' according to the HTTP standard is the prefer mechanism for authorisation.
The data contained within the leads that are sent and received includes personal (particularly identifiable) information of customers either of dealers or carsales. As part of our commitment to privacy we do not allow this information to be sent in the clear across unsecure networks. There is absolutely no reason in not supporting encryption of this information.
Yes you can. If you provide a unique identifier the lead will be created, and the id returned will be the same id you submitted. If you resubmit the same id as a previous lead submitted, then that lead will be updated, and a new lead will not be created. Please make sure the globally unique identifier provided is in the valid hexadecimal format: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 (note tha placement of the dashes). The id is not case sensitive.
DO NOT simply use "ExampleService". It is invalid :). The service name is used to describe the organisation (or system) that is submitting the lead. It will be a unique name provided to you to do just that, describe the organisation (or system) you are using. For a lead to be successfully processed this service name must be configured by carsales.com Ltd IT support staff.
Every Autogate account at carsales.com Ltd is allocated a unique identifier. You will need to contact the dealer support team to obtain the unique identifier for any specific Autogate account. It will be up to your system to manage and maintain the link between your system identifiers and the carsales.com Ltd Autogate identifier.
This is because Autogate integrates with hundreds of systems, and accomodating everyones requirement would be a nightmare - and costly - to maintain. Therefore Autogate considers a lead to only have the following statuses: New, Contact, Commitment, Sold, Lost, Duplicate, and Unworkable.
If you want to add more detail, e.g. Brochure Requested, Brochure Sent, Test Driven etc. then tags are suitable to add and remove this information. Tags are searchable in Autogate.