Overview

This document is a handover for Autotrader to build a native insurance comparison experience on the Autotrader website, mirroring the journey Simplify runs today. The customer answers a short set of questions, Simplify generates quotes from multiple insurers via the Insurance API, and the results are presented for the customer to compare and select.

It covers three things:

  1. Data capture — the questions/screens needed to collect insurance details from the customer.
  2. API integration — how to create a lead, generate quotes, update the lead, and retrieve quotes.
  3. Displaying quotes — how to poll for and present the comparison results.

Audience: Autotrader's Product/UX designer (Sections 1 & 3) and the technical/integration team (all sections).

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Field summaries below are intentionally concise. For the full API specification — environment base URLs, authentication, endpoints, and request/response schemas — refer to the Swagger API documentation.

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End-to-end sequence

  1. Customer completes the qualifying questions (Section 1).
  2. On completion, the front end calls Create Lead with includeQuote = true (Section 2). This returns an externalLeadId.
  3. The front end polls Get Quotes using that externalLeadId until quotingStatus = Completed, showing a loading state.
  4. Quotes are displayed for comparison (Section 3).
  5. When the customer selects an insurer, the front end calls Update Lead to set the selected insurer, then redirects the customer to that insurer's referralUrl to complete the purchase.

1. Data capture — question sequence

The sequence below mirrors Simplify's flow and is provided as an example only — Autotrader can determine the ordering and grouping of the questions to best suit its own experience. Autotrader will source vehicle data from its own vehicle dataset — the vehicle step just needs to resolve the required vehicle fields listed below.

Not every question needs to be asked to generate a quote — some can be given sensible default assumptions to streamline the flow (see Optimising the experience below the table).

The API field(s) column lists the fields each answer maps to in the Create Lead request (grouped into request objects in Section 2).