Dealer Commerce Operating Layer: API Marketplace and Open API Mesh

The client is the dealership-management backbone for North American automotive retail with thousands of dealer customers and hundreds of billions in annual commerce supported. A private equity firm took the company private in 2022. The platform strategy is to convert a fragmented mesh of dealer-vendor relationships into a governed commerce operating layer where sales, F&I, service, parts, accounting, CRM, marketplace data, and OEM connectivity sit on one set of common surfaces. Taller's engagement at the company is exclusively design, user research, and product-design management with eighteen roles filled across 2022 to 2024, all UX/UI, research, or localization. The four cases below describe what Taller's design pod has delivered against the strategic surfaces of the company's dealer experience platform.

The company's dealer experience platform spans CRM (the CRM platform), the API marketplace, Unify SSO and role-based workflows, the core DMS, and the analytics product. For dealers to experience the platform as one product rather than five products on a common login, the user surface across modules has to share visual language, interaction patterns, and role-aware information architecture. The commercial promise of a consolidated commerce operating layer cannot be felt at the dealer level without that cross-module experience continuity.

Taller's design practice operates across multiple dealer experience platform product surfaces: the CRM (the CRM platform), Unify's SSO and role-based-workflow layer, the core DMS, and marketplace-facing dealer experiences. The company's design system serves as the shared discipline across all of them. The methodology is consistent across surfaces: research-led design validated through user testing with the dealer-facing roles each module serves, high-fidelity prototyping, and structured handoff to the company's engineering teams.

Sustained multi-surface design coverage from 2022 through 2024, with the design system applied consistently across CRM, Unify, DMS, and marketplace-facing products. Design handoffs to the company's engineering across these surfaces were formalized, creating a more predictable and scalable delivery process. The consistent application of design standards improved the overall user experience across the platform ecosystem, increasing user satisfaction by replacing previously fragmented touchpoints with a more coherent, intuitive, and unified experience.

The company's platform strategy depends on dealers experiencing the dealer experience platform as one product. Marketplace platform engineering, API design, marketplace governance, and integration discipline (REST and event-driven APIs, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, JWT, OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, webhooks, SOC 1 / SOC 2 / ISO 27001) belong to the company. The cross-module user surface that lets dealers move between modules without re-learning the platform is where Taller's design discipline contributes to a commercial promise that spans over a thousand integrated partners and hundreds of billions in annual automotive commerce.