January 29, 2020

Swift Product Spotlight

Car in front of buildings
Fuse Interactive has a long history of working with automotive industry members, beginning in 2011, when we partnered with the OpenRoad Auto Group to provide website support and development. As OpenRoad’s focus on their online presence and sales experience continued to intensify, so did the collaborative relationship with Fuse Interactive and over the past 9 years, we have continued to deliver many innovations in the area of online automotive retail, now considered the standard among dealership groups.

By 2015, it was apparent that OpenRoad’s competitors and peers were paying close attention to the rapid development of their website. Quebec-based Groupe Park Avenue came to us in search of a development partner to assist them in creating a dynamic new website that they could iterate and improve on, free from vendor lock-in. Their technology requirements spurred us to finely-hone our technical knowledge of the automotive industry.

Product History

Prior to commencing development on Groupe Park Avenue’s website in 2015, we took a step back to evaluate how we, from a technological standpoint, interacted with vehicle data through an entire lifecycle. While Drupal made a great content management system for the websites at the time, we are fans of separation of concerns and choosing the right tool for the right job.

Given the wealth of knowledge we had acquired working with OpenRoad, we spent some time evaluating possible solutions to help improve the quality and completeness of inventory and vehicle data. What we found was often disappointing: unable to handle fundamental functionality such as multilingual data (a must for the Quebec market!), to not integrating with popular services or locking customers in to proprietary or expensive system.

On February 11, 2015 we decided to roll up our sleeves, and made the first commit to the repository of a project we codenamed “swift”. In the end the name ended up sticking, and the Swift inventory management system has now received thousands of commits, performed millions of web service calls and transferred hundreds of terabytes of data.

Product Overview

Swift overview

The first task Swift accomplishes is to aggregate your existing inventory data, both new and used, from various DMS systems such as Reynolds and Reynolds, CDK Drive and One-Eighty and AutoTrader to name just a few. It does this by periodically communicating with the DMS to determine what inventory is new, updated or has been removed and reflects these changes in the application.

With the Inventory aggregated, Swift works with various automotive data suppliers, such as AutoData Solutions, EVOX and vAuto, to provide supplementary data and enhancements. From decoding the VIN for precise technical data, colour-matched stock photography and rich media, always up-to-date incentives and comparative pricing reports, your inventory is automatically enhanced to entice customers.

Of course, you can take full control and optimize your marketing strategy: upload your own inventory photos with editing tools built-in, set your own pricing strategy with discounts, edit inventory technical data including packages and equipment. Any changes you make will be automatically syndicated to any number of destinations, including stunning websites (such as OpenRoad Auto Group or Groupe Park Avenue!), marketplaces such as Kijiji, AutoTrader, or Facebook or practically any service you can imagine.


Interested in finding out how Swift may benefit your automotive business? Please don't hesitate to reach out and we'd be happy to discuss further.

Photo by Jesse Collins on Unsplash