Digital Retailing Example Use Case

A common use case in the voluntary protection product industry is digital retailing. This may also be referred to as digital desking, e-rating, e-contracting, etc.

A common first step towards facilitating this use case is to acquire a set of "rates" that are available for a given covered item e.g. a Car, Truck, Boat, RV, ATV, Television, etc.

The "RateQuote" endpoint is the way that rates can be acquired from the SEA system:

Rates_GetRateQuote

Dealer business key (Number) is the primary argument, but there are several other parameters that must be passed in the query string to acquire rates. Other than dealer key, the other query string parameters may or may not be required depending on the configuration set up by the product administrator.

If you receive an error to the effect of "No plans found" that does not necessarily indicate an issue with the API. This often means that either there is a configuration issue by the product administrator in their SEA environment, or the information that was provided simply does not qualify for any rates.

The next common step is to get the requisite information needed to generate a draft PDF and/or create the agreement / contract in the backend system. SEA offers a way for product administrators to add custom fields that are required for entry. As such, it is a good idea to call the endpoint that provides information on the requisite fields for a given product prior to trying to create a PDF or originate a contract:

[TODO]: Insert endpoint for custom fields here once it is available.

After receiving the custom fields, the Contract endpoint can be used to request a contract be added to the system:
Contracts_Post