CREATING API INTEGRATION ECOSYSTEM FOR THE US AUTOMOTIVE RETAIL SECTOR

When Motive Retail first approached us, they had two key solutions in place: Motive Integrator (later rebranded as MIX), which connected automotive partners via APIs, and a desktop app for managing certification workflows (which would later become Certify). But both systems had to evolve to handle the scale, flexibility and user experience Motive Retail envisioned.

We faced two major challenges: One was rethinking the API certification process so integrations could be tested and approved before going live. We would need to carry out a full rewrite to create the platform now known as Certify.

The other was expanding Motive Integrator to meet growing business needs. An early transition from a desktop app to a Liferay-based web portal solved accessibility at first, but soon revealed new problems: performance bottlenecks, hefty maintenance requirements, and increasing misalignment with growth goals.

To address these issues, we evolved Motive Integrator into MIX. Certain functions, like secure subscription approvals and dealer data governance, needed to be separated into dedicated services (Activate, Admin panel) so that each could evolve independently and scale better. We also needed to add a new tool, namely Console, for real-time usage analytics of API traffic to give manufacturers and internal teams visibility into request errors and performance patterns. Here, our main challenge was building new features to strengthen architecture, stability and performance, so MIX could handle a growing network of integrations.

It meant tackling architectural complexity, keeping performance stable under high load, and coordinating interactions between various user roles across interconnected systems.

• Modernizing legacy architecture: Their original tech, including the Liferay-based portal, outdated frontend components, and older Java modules were increasingly hard to maintain and scale, driving up long-term maintenance costs. Over the years, many features had evolved organically without consistent design patterns or architecture. Updating and refactoring these components required careful planning to avoid regressions and maintain platform uptime.
• Supporting a multi-role ecosystem: The ecosystem serves a wide variety of users, manufacturers, subscribers, dealers and internal admins, each with unique workflows and permissions. This meant ensuring stability across several independent tools (Certify, Activate, Console, Admin) while guaranteeing smooth communication between them with open endpoints and shared logic.
• Maintaining high performance under growing user and data loads: With hundreds of thousands of requests passing through Activate daily, and thousands of certification requests handled by Certify, performance and infrastructure design became critical. We needed to introduce best practices like asynchronous processing (with AWS SQS), multithreading, caching and request optimization for consistent speed and reliability across both certification and subscription activation.
• Delivering new features alongside maintenance: With increasing user needs and pressure to surpass competitors, our team was often tasked with introducing new functionality, like building automated billing and dealer approval flows, while keeping production systems stable and responsive. This required strategic feature release planning to deliver improvements quickly without disrupting ongoing operations or user workflows.
• Building internal tooling to reduce system load: As certification requests increased, Certify had to validate a growing number of XML files. Each had structured data that needed to be checked against manufacturer-defined rules, a computationally heavy process that slowed Certify during peak usage. To reduce Certify’s workload, improve user processing speed and keep performance predictable, we needed to design and implement a Validation API–a separate, high-performance service dedicated to XML validations.
• Coordinating long-term development across a growing ecosystem: Continuous delivery while building out multiple interconnected systems required close coordination across parallel teams, careful version management, and maintaining stability for hundreds of thousands of daily requests in live production.

Over 17 years of partnership, we’ve supported Motive Retail in evolving its products from early tools into a multidimensional ecosystem for API-driven collaboration. Along the way, our team helped improve performance, expand functionality, and strengthen reliability, leading to the following strategic and technical outcomes:

• Continuous growth and flexibility: Since 2008, we’ve helped grow Motive Retail’s digital presence, evolving two initial platforms into a multi-product ecosystem serving dealers, manufacturers, API subscribers and their internal teams in the US. Continuous partnership preserves critical product knowledge and helps our partner respond to new business opportunities quickly–they scale features, adopt new tech, and expand into new product areas without sacrificing system stability or delivery pace.
• Accelerated product modernization and scalability: Upgrades from Liferay to Java, JavaScript to TypeScript, and several major Angular version updates were paired with thoughtful refactoring and new functionality to help Motive Retail roll out features faster, improve platform performance and reduce long-term maintenance costs. Their updated platform makes it easy to scale for growing user volumes and new market needs without disrupting operations.
• Enabled real-time data processing at enterprise scale: With architectural improvements like caching, multithreading, asynchronous processing and Validation API offloading, their systems reliably handle hundreds of thousands of daily requests and thousands of concurrent certification flows without slowdowns or crashes.
• Built automation and tooling to exponentially accelerate ops: We cut invoice data generation from weeks to minutes, ensured compliance without back-and-forth emails, and sped up onboarding by replacing error-prone manual processes with features like automated billing preparation, dealer-driven subscription approvals, and scalable test workflows. These improvements streamline both internal operations and client-facing processes to improve speed, accuracy and transparency across Motive Retail’s ecosystem.
• Maintained stability and quality across a complex, fast-evolving platform: Deliveries sustain zero deployment failures over years of active deployment, even as functionality, integrations and traffic volumes increase dramatically. We achieve this level of reliability with rigorous manual and automated testing, like regression and end-to-end coverage, and close attention to detail.
• Improved strategic direction through proactive ownership: Acting as an extension of Motive Retail’s product team, we quickly identify opportunities, propose improvements and influence roadmap priorities based on insights from real-world usage analytics. By introducing features that address emerging user needs and recommending architectural changes that support increased usership, API certifications, and faster onboarding, our team’s input consistently balances tech with business impact. This approach helps Motive Retail prioritize directions that resonate with their users and market.

• Multi-phase API certification workflows (Certify): A configurable workflow lets manufacturers design and split certification programs into clear testing stages, such as API connection checks, data validation, and other steps, that subscribers complete. Certify tracks progress, manages file exchanges in a unified format and provides a single platform for both parties to collaborate. This reduces tedious back-and-forth communication and accelerates the move from user onboarding to active data exchange.
• Administrative configuration panel and monitoring console (part of MIX): To support both system stability and operational flexibility, we developed a console and admin panel within MIX. Console gives manufacturers and Motive Retail’s internal teams real-time visibility into live request traffic, system errors and historical activity. Alongside it, the Admin Panel lets admins control user roles, subscription logic, service mappings and contract configurations. It also supports manufacturer-specific customizations, letting Motive Retail adapt their platform to various business needs without requiring hardcoded changes.
• Custom announcement and communication system (Certify): To support clearer communication between all parties, we introduced a built-in announcement tool. Manufacturers and Motive Retail admins can send real-time updates, onboarding instructions and alerts to subscribers directly on the platform, reducing reliance on external email threads and improving information visibility.
• Real-time API subscription workflows with dealer approval (Activate): Within MIX, Activate provides a secure flow for managing API access subscriptions. Subscribers request access to manufacturer APIs and services, like vehicle specs or pricing, and Activate routes these requests for dealer approval before activation. This creates an audit trail and gives each party accountability and control, so they can monitor connections and stop unauthorized flows.
• Role-based dashboards and reporting tools (Certify): Certify includes a set of dashboards tailored to user groups, from manufacturers tracking multiple certification programs to subscribers monitoring the current status of certification testing. These dashboards provide key metrics like project status, test progress, service readiness and pass/fail rates, helping all parties stay aligned and accountable throughout integration with the platform.
• Dynamic service mapping and access control (Activate): Activate lets manufacturers define service templates that control the API endpoints subscribers use. Once a request is approved, Activate automatically provides access, registers the subscription, and documents complete activity history to meet compliance and troubleshooting requirements. Admins can update API services and endpoints, like vehicle data or pricing, and pause or update dealer subscriptions directly through Activate’s interface, without directly editing the database.
• XML validation at scale with internal API (Validation API): We adapted the system to the increase in certification requests by separating validation logic from the main Certify system into a dedicated Validation API service. When a subscriber uploads test files, they’re automatically routed to this internal API, where business rules are applied to validate the files. This architectural decision significantly reduces server load, stabilizes the platform’s peak-traffic performance, and allows for faster response times during certification testing.
• Automated billing data generation (Activate): A tool within Active eliminates two weeks’ worth of manual spreadsheet work. It automatically aggregates active subscriptions and outputs structured billing data. Now, it takes just one click to immediately generate a full list of subscribers, services and usage data formatted for invoicing.