eWebRenter Quick-Quote Plugin Documentation

The Quick-Quote feature relies on a straight-forward, RESTful API to "post" form data to the servers at Dealership Software. You would invoke the API from your existing "contact form" page, perhaps via Javascript. Each time a successful post occurs, a new quote request is generated, and appears in your eWebRenter dashboard. A new customer will be generated unless the user's email and last name match an existing customer, in which case the existing customer's information will be used and updated as necessary.

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Resource URL

https://online.ewebrenter.com/quote/request

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Resource Information

Response format: text/plain

Requires authentication: CORS-based access control

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Result

Success: "ok"

Failure: Error code

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jQuery plugin code

A sample javascript (a jQuery plugin) is available that you can add to your existing "contact form" page. The plugin makes use of the jQuery Validation plugin to validate all supported form fields prior to submission. You may customize the code to your environment.

Below is a snippet of the Ajax call used in the plugin. Essentially, the plugin code will "intercept" the form submit event, send the form data to the server, then continue with the default form processing.

You can call your current default form processing after the Ajax call returns, perhaps adjusting the behavior based on the returned data (e.g., success or failure). Or, you can simply always call the default form processing by placing the form.submit() call in the Ajax .always() clause. In either case, you should continue to email/text the form information to your sales team as you normally would. In this way, if there is a failure somewhere, then at least either your default form processing, or the eWebRenter processing will have captured the customer's order.

Supported form data fields

The quote/request API is expecting a single, flat JSON object composed of field names and their corresponding values, e.g.,

var form_data = {
  dealership_name : dealership_name,
  dealership_id : dealership_id,
  location_id : location_id,
  lead_source : lead_source,
  firstname : firstname,
  ...
}

The table below lists the supported field names, along with a brief description, the recommended type for HTML form usage, whether or not the field is required by the API, and additional notes, such as accepted values, min/max value lengths, etc.

There are only a few fields that are required by the plugin; in particular, database look-ups depend on the email and last name. Submitting only the required fields, however, tends to lessen the usefulness of the plugin. That is, since the point is to reduce double-entry, you are encouraged to make use of as many of the recommended fields as is feasible for your situation.

The HTML 'name' tags used on form field may be anything you wish, as long as the values are bound to the expected field names when creating the JSON object. That is, if the name tag for the HTML "First name" text field is "first_name", then the Javascript could contain something like:

var firstname = $("input[name='first_name']").val();