Power your retail innovation strategy with APIs

This blog was originally published on 28 February 2020 and updated 18 April 2023.

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Retailers are urgently innovating to create the seamless and personalised omnichannel experiences consumers now expect. They are looking for new ways to make use of their data and connect their systems together to streamline business processes and create great customer experiences. One major advantage of using a unified commerce is that its open architecture that lets you easily make those connections with APIs.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are present in every part of our digital world. Every time you use an app like LinkedIn, make a Skype call or listen to Spotify on your phone, there’s an API in action.

APIs let you add specialised functionality to a website, application, platform or software without having to write all of the back-end code. By using APIs, you can expose data in real time, rather than having to replicate or move it. The result is a set of functions that’s available across various systems, plus a fast and easy way to plug in and deploy new services, channels and devices.

These improvements let you shift your team’s priority from maintenance to innovation.

By using APIs to access existing solutions in the market, you are free to focus your development efforts on the front-end. You can be be more agile and create a community of third-party apps and systems that work together in an ecosystem. As a result, you’ll reduce integration and maintenance overheads, increase real-time accuracy and enjoy virtually limitless scalability and agility.

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APIs in action

Here are just some of the ways APIs help you optimise operations, personalise customer experiences and drive new revenue:

Retail anywhere, any time

APIs let you easily expose your product catalogues and other eCommerce solutions to give customers many more ways to engage with your brand, including social commerce.

Deliver anywhere, any how

Consumers now make purchasing decisions based on shipping costs and timings. APIs can power the fulfilment options they now expect - such as click-and-collect, store-to-door, scheduled delivery and even 1-hour delivery.

Payment convenience counts

APIs give consumers the payment options and ‘buy-now, pay later’ services they want, both in-store and online. Infinity was the first retail system in the world to integrate with Afterpay at point of sale and supports Adyen, Smartpay, Laybuy, Alipay, WeChat Pay, Slyp and Zip to name just a few payment partners.

Personalised communications

APIs let you connect internal and external data to create timely and relevant communications, recommendations, offers and rewards. You can provide customers with real-time shipping visibility and tracking throughout the shipping journey, no matter the fulfilment solution. APIs let you create customised recommendations for customers visiting stores during click-and-collect pickups, and extend them into other communications, such as e-receipts and shipping notifications.

And they help to create personalised marketing experiences that boost loyalty and increase conversions - such as notifications for items on sale, low-in-stock or restocked – plus product recommendations on the website, based on each customer’s behaviour and past data.

Virtual Shopping

APIs support virtual retail shopping ecosystems that go beyond live chat to support in-store experiences on digital channels. By integrating video commerce platforms with POS solutions (like Infinity), you can automate the end-to-end process, from customer communications and data insights to seamless sales transactions and fast delivery.

Extending digital into stores 

APIs also improve the in-store shopping experience. You can give your in-store teams’ data on customer histories and shopping preferences, as well as personalised recommendations based on past purchases and wishlists. APIs can help provide product recommendations for customers visiting stores for click-and-collect pickups, answer product questions in real-time and support self-checkout. In addition, new multichannel wishlists let customers add items to their wishlists while browsing in stores

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So how do you start making the most of APIs?

Begin by evaluating your company’s value chain. Can you easily integrate and use APIs to access third-party platforms and services to scale your business? Or can you release your own APIs to attract partners and build out your platform? The two options are not mutually exclusive.

 An API-enabled platform like Infinity lets you scale your business quickly by easily adding new apps and services as business requirements change.

 We can also help if you’re looking for advice on how to create a strategy and implement an API programme that quickly creates customer and business value.

 The end result is the ability to create extraordinary customer experiences that help to capture market opportunities, generate additional revenue and build brand advocacy.

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Find out more about Infinity APIs and our integration partners. Then contact us for advice on how to use APIs to achieve greater agility, faster growth and better margins.

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For more on how a move to a unified commerce strategy gives you the flexibility and agility you need to keep in step with consumers’ changing needs, download our new ebook:

New in Infinity – November 2021

Check out the latest enhancements across the Infinity platform designed to help you and your team work more efficiently and create the fast, frictionless experiences customers expect.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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INFINITY APIs

Easily validate customer addresses

Infinity is now integrated with the Addressify and NZ Post address validation services. This prevents customers from providing inaccurate or incomplete address details, giving you the confidence that web and store orders are linked to the correct customer address. It includes validation of addresses for loyalty customers, orders and quotes, and customers stored in Infinity Loyalty. To use this feature, you’ll need a service agreement with Addressify and/or NZ Post.

Increase efficiency when receipting multiple POs

A new API allows your external suppliers to create a group of purchase orders (or purchase order lines) to make it easier for you to receipt multiple purchase orders at once. Suppliers can generate an Advanced Shipment Notice to provide information about the items included, and their related purchase order lines, so you can be prepared to check and accept delivery.

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INVENTORY

Increase accuracy of inter-branch stock transfers

Your stores can use the new Inter-branch Transfers Report to check for any variances between stock sent to them from another store and the stock that arrives. The report helps reduce inventory leakage between branches and force better stock management practices. It’s particularly useful for retailers who sell high-value items that are routinely transferred between branches. Stores will only see stock movements to or from their own branch.

Simplify stock receipting

You can now configure Infinity so that whole numbers (1,2,3) rather than decimals (1.00, 2.4) must be used in stock receipting. This simplifies stock receipting if you only use whole numbers in stock management and reduces the opportunity for time-wasting errors and confusion. 

Comply with AGDC data requirements

North American cigarette retailers can now use Infinity to meet AGDC (Altria Group Distribution Company) scan data requirements. You can report sales to tobacco companies directly, and then receive reimbursement from them, using an automated process that identifies eligible sales transactions and generates weekly reports in a AGDC compliant format.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Full visibility of orders

The Click and Collect Dashboard has been renamed the Orders Orchestration Dashboard to better reflect the wide range of customer order scenarios that it manages, including collection and delivery via store-to-door, drop shipping and click and collect.

Email customers order information

If you capture transaction data in the TH_FieldText fields, you can now include that data in the email that is sent to customers with their transaction receipt.  This allows you to include additional, business-specific information in the email that your customers receive.

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REPORTS

Give fuel sites better AA Smartfuel loyalty reporting

Fuel stores have three new reports that enable them to see transactional details for the  AA Smartfuel program, more easily gauge how the program is performing and assess ways to improve its productivity. The reports include analysis of fuel discounts accumulated by customers, fuel discounts redeemed by customers and non-fuel product sales that qualified for shop-sponsored cents-per-litre discounts.

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POINT OF SALE

Give your customers a single receipt

If your business uses PC EFTPOS NZ, you can now take advantage of the ability to only print one receipt, saving on paper and giving your customers the option to make a more sustainable shopping choice.

And if you want to go paperless and eliminate all paper receipts, Australian retailers can use Slyp Smart Receipts to send digital receipts direct to the customer’s banking app.

Let customers mix and match their loyalty accounts

Fuel retailers who use Infinity Loyalty to offer cents-per-litre discounts via an app can now allow their customers to group together loyalty accounts using the app and redeem saved cents-per-litre discounts from any of these accounts during a fuel purchase. This allows fuel customers who have multiple accounts amongst family members to mix and match how they use their accounts, reducing potential confusion about where their saved cents-per-litre discounts have gone.

Analyse historic foot traffic in stores

You can now record the foot traffic in your stores retrospectively, instead of just on the current day, giving your staff greater flexibility in record-keeping and providing a more comprehensive, reliable picture of the numbers of customers entering your stores. The foot traffic functionality is also now available in Restricted Back Office.  

Allow customers to change their minds during refunds

Your store staff can now cancel out of a refund to Afterpay and Zip, giving customers the opportunity to reverse their decision and preventing unintentional refunds to these two payment methods.

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TECHNOLOGY

• Stock information can be shared throughout your solution infrastructure more readily and seamlessly. The Cloud Events Service now publishes notifications about purchase orders, goods receipts and goods receipt cancellations, in addition to sales invoices. That means external systems, such as ERPs, use near real-time stock management information from Infinity rather than having to use custom integrations, flat files or pulling information using API.

• We’ve renewed Infinity’s certification with Quest Payment Systems in New Zealand, giving users of the Quest pinpad configured for use with Paymark the ability to integrate their EFTPOS solution with Infinity POS.

• Infinity now allows you to proactively prevent accidental mass data updates which can impact the Linker performance and reduce the real-time accuracy of information. Additional protection on the AKPOS database triggers blocks if updates to more than 20,000 rows are attempted within a single update. Block triggers can be removed as well as added.  

• To help retailers improve their security compliance, Infinity Web Integration and Infinity Loyalty now support the ability to work with TLS 1.0 disabled. This enables businesses to disable the now obsolete TLS 1.0 protocol and reduce their security risk profile. 

• Infinity Quickfire has been modified so that you can now automate upgrades by performing a silent upgrade of Infinity ETL and the Infinity Cloud Events Service using the Command line.

• The Infinity Gift Card API has been converted to a REST API for easier integration.

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

Power your retail innovation strategy with APIs

Connecting channels and personalising the shopping experience is vital to meeting consumers’ rising expectations. One major advantage of using a unified commerce platform as your retail management system (RMS), is its open architecture that lets you easily make those connections with APIs.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are present in every part of our digital world. Every time you use an app like LinkedIn, make a Skype call or listen to Spotify on your phone, there’s an API in action.

APIs let you add specialised functionality to a website, application, platform or software without having to write all of the back-end code. By using APIs, you can connect tools and expose data in real time, rather than having to replicate or move it. The result is one set of functions that’s available across various systems, plus an easy way to plug in and deploy new services, channels and devices. 

These improvements let you shift your team’s priority from maintenance to innovation. By using APIs to access existing solutions in the market, you are free to focus your development efforts on the front-end. You can be more agile and create a community of third-party apps and systems that work together in an ecosystem. As a result, you’ll reduce integration and maintenance overheads, increase real-time accuracy and enjoy virtually limitless scalability and agility.

---

APIs in action

Here are just some of the ways APIs help you optimise operations and personalise customer experiences:

Retail anywhere, any time

APIs let you easily expose your product catalogues and other eCommerce solutions to give customers many more ways to engage with your brand, including social commerce.

Deliver anywhere, any how

Shipping and delivery APIs let you integrate third party services to automate everything from the sale through to the parcel being delivered to your customer’s address of choice. Think fulfilment options like click-and-collect, store-to-door and drop shipping.

Payment convenience counts

Give consumers the payment options and ‘buy-now, pay later’ services they want. Infinity was the first in the world to integrate with Afterpay at point of sale and supports Adyen, Smartpay, Laybuy, Alipay, WeChat Pay, and Slyp to name a few payment partners.

Voice and visual to boost personalisation

Visual search APIs help customers quickly find the products they want – like Cue Clothing’s Style Finder mobile app. And you can consider using Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant APIs to further tailor the shopping experience and boosts sales.

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So how do you start making the most of APIs?

Begin by evaluating your company’s value chain. Can you easily integrate and use APIs to access third-party platforms and services to scale your business? Or can you release your own APIs to attract partners and build out your platform? The two options are not mutually exclusive. 

An API-enabled platform like Infinity lets you scale your business quickly by easily adding new apps and services as business requirements change.

We can also help if you’re looking for advice on how to create a strategy and implement an API programme that quickly creates customer and business value.

The end result is the ability to create extraordinary customer experiences that help to capture market opportunities, generate additional revenue and build brand advocacy.

---

Find out more about Infinity APIs and our integration partners. Then contact us for advice on how to use APIs to achieve greater agility, faster growth and better margins.

Turning retail experience ideas into reality: meet our new Consulting Lead

Neshma Emile has recently been promoted to Consulting Lead. She’ll be helping more Triquestra clients use the Infinity platform to transform customer experiences. 

Before joining Triquestra, Neshma had ERP implementation roles at construction and building products companies. As a Business Analyst, it was her job to help her clients convert ideas into tangible realities. As Consulting Lead, she’ll be supporting the consulting team to do the same.

“As BA, I was responsible for gathering requirements from the customer and turning them into testable, then usable product. Making sure we’re on the same page and delivering in scope and on time. Now, as Consulting Lead, I also help other business analysts do what they do best. Offering a helping hand so they can become better advisors and get the best results for our customers,” says Neshma. 

“The way Infinity can help retailers digitise and innovate today is really great. How we deliver order management, click-and-collect, how we've integrated with Slyp receipts – we're doing everything to keep our clients in tune with what's modern in the market. It’s our goal to give our clients new ways of connecting to their customers through our product and experience,” she says. 

Because Neshma comes from an ERP background, she understands software and process integration and thinks Infinity is an outstanding retail platform. “With Infinity, because it's designed to meet the specific requirements of retail end users, we always hit the nail on the head. Infinity always gives customers what they need because it's such a mature and stable unified commerce platform. People can innovate off of it really quickly and know that it won't break other systems or processes.”

In regards to innovation, she gives examples like Cue Clothing’s click-and-collect and Z Energy’s Pumped and Sharetank. “For Sharetank, we had Infinity working as it needed to for fuel POS. Then we enhanced the platform and the APIs which are used by the Z app to let consumers find the lowest priced fuel in a 30k radius, prepay for that fuel and then share it with others. And for the Pumped loyalty programme, we proved how stable Infinity is to manage 250 sales transactions per minute.” 

Neshma thinks Triquestra is a good company because of the digital transformations she works on and the company’s culture. She explains, “We’re great at prioritising and we're great at communicating with customers. Our solution and business architects will go in and partner with the client to make sure that the solution is well thought out. 

“We work in a high pressure environment and you'd think you'd have people really anxious and angry but we're not! We're really happy. Even if someone’s role isn’t customer facing, everyone is always looking out for our clients’ best interest and doing what they can to make sure those clients are happy. 

“You’re also really given the opportunity to learn, grow and push yourself every day. I’m young and I don’t have to compensate for that. They hired me because of my skills and work ethic and that’s what they reward me for.” 

Neshma and everyone at Triquestra is very conscious of what retail means today. “While online shopping has definitely changed the landscape, people haven’t stopped going to the shops. It’s the experience the shopper has, whether they’re online or instore, that makes one retailer more successful than another these days.”

Introduce customers to smart, digital receipts with Slyp and Infinity

Attention Australian retailers – Slyp now integrates with Infinity, giving you another option to help customers track their purchases. Slyp partners with banks and retailers to send interactive smart receipts directly to shoppers through their banking app after they make a purchase with a bank or credit card. So you can both say goodbye to paper receipts.

Consumers get itemised purchase and warranty information, and you can even include links to related products in their receipt. You get rich in-store data and can easily set and review marketing campaigns inside receipts. 

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Here’s a closer look at how Slyp works:

1. Slyp and your Infinity POS are seamlessly connected via API.

2. A customer makes a purchase with their bank card.

3. Slyp extracts the purchase data and matches it to bank transactions.

4. Transactions are sent to the customer’s bank app or by SMS text message and displayed as feature rich, intuitive smart receipts. 

5. You view analytics in real-time through your MySlyp dashboard. 

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If you want to go paperless, improve customer experience and have a new way to engage with customers when they’ve left your store, talk to us about Slyp and Infinity today.