Mike Baxter, head of Infinity product, shares his thoughts on using APIs for retail so you can get new products and services to market faster and improve customer experience. In this first video, Mike discusses the advantages of microservices for APIs and why this design pattern isn’t the only one to consider when you want to innovate quickly.
Five things to look for in a retail technology partner
If the beginning of the year means it’s time to re-evaluate your retail systems, start here.
No matter the scale of what you want to accomplish – boosting POS functionality, getting a single view of inventory, or starting your unified commerce journey to connect POS, inventory, fulfilment, order and customer data – you need a partner with the right people, processes and technology. A partner who understands retail’s demands and can give you the system that will improve customer happiness, staff satisfaction and your bottom line.
Here are important indicators of a good technology partner plus questions to ask
1
Maturity and market responsiveness
Look for a partner who’s been around retail for a while, with a sound platform, business model and proposition. They’ll need to understand your fast-paced, data-intensive environment where any significant level of downtime is unacceptable.
Their people will have the capability to help you plan and implement your projects so they suit you right now and into the future. When you choose a partner with a mature platform, they can focus on delivering innovation because the core functionality you need already exists.
2
Customer experience
Make sure your partner has a recent and proven success record for planning, implementing and managing complex, large-scale deployments across multiple stores, multiple formats and multiple geographies.
Do they have stable and well-tested strategies and technology or are they just adapting existing supply chain and fulfilment models? Ask if they’ve worked with related technology, systems and service providers. And how their capability integrates with eCommerce, payments, supply chain and finance software.
Request case studies or references and ask about the consultancy, customisation, deployment, training and support services they provide.
3
An agile and innovative mindset
You want a partner who’s got the people and processes to move fast, while cultivating an environment where innovation flourishes. They should use agile methodologies and have experience working with agile retailers.
Get evidence of their history of responsiveness and their ability to assess and quickly correct any unforeseen issues. Ask how they’ve managed things for a client when faced with unexpected changes, a competitor’s action or customer demands.
4
Broad product capability
Choose a partner that can give you a broad and holistic portfolio, perspective and experience. One that gives you all your core requirements out-of-the-box plus the ability to customise and easily add new functionality.
For the best customer experience, you need to intrinsically link inventory, fulfilment, orders, supply chain and planning. You don’t want to be tied to a point player that can only provide portions.
Your partner should let third parties connect to their technology via APIs and cultivate a community with those parties so you can give customers more shopping, payment and fulfilment options.
You also need to know that your partner has a strategic roadmap and investment committed for new capabilities.
5
Best of local, best of global
Look for a partner that’s an Australasian business, focused on our region’s potential to succeed. A local partner means you can have more influence on the product roadmap and enjoy direct engagement with people on the ground who are committed to your success (and not distracted by offshore business activity). And a mid-size partner is more likely to view you as an important customer of influence. It’s far better to be a big fish in a small pond (and not have to fight for attention as a small fish in a big pond would).
If you’d like a benchmark to rate your current or potential technology partner against, contact us. For more than 23 years, Infinity has been dedicated to the development, implementation and support of retail systems. We’re renowned for being both pioneering and reliable. You can count on us for consulting, platform implementation, integration, training and support that helps you get great results.
Becoming an agile retailer: Why you need both agility and stability to innovate
Building your business case for agile working? According to McKinsey, the best approach is to build a stable foundation of things that don’t change, to free you up for speed in other areas. Here’s how to create that stable core for reliability and efficiency, while introducing more dynamic elements that let you respond nimbly and quickly to new challenges and opportunities.
Why point of sale is not ‘just POS’
4 reasons retailers should adopt agile
With constantly changing customer behaviours and expectations, and employee demands for more flexible and connected workplaces, it’s critical to become more agile to respond to digital challenges. This series explains how agile development helps retailers deliver products faster and better. We’re kicking it off with a look at why you need to think and act agile.
Convert more sales with ship-from-store
Infinity Loyalty - how a rewards programme shows customers you care
APIs and innovation: build your competitive advantage now
Want to increase your pace of innovation?
Giving your customers truly innovative experiences is the fourth step in your unified commerce journey. By this stage, you’ll have centralised your inventory and customer data onto a single platform, you’ll be extending brand experiences across all channels and you’ll be delighting customers with personalised experiences and messages. Next is shifting your team’s priorities to innovation and using APIs for a disruptive competitive advantage.
The most innovative retailers are creating new business models that are less focused on the store-online-mobile balance and instead concentrate on building ecosystems that give their customers extraordinary experiences.
These retailers have realised that they need to access third-party data and services to successfully give customers what they want at every step of the customer journey. In the past, that required moving a lot of data between systems and possibly even replicating functionality in systems to achieve a consistent outcome.
Now the best retailers are embracing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for efficient and open connectivity between applications, partners and customers. Using APIs, they can expose rather than move or replicate data, and make one set of functions available across various systems without having to recreate it.
APIs are present in every part of our digital world. Every time we use an app like LinkedIn, make a Skype call or listen to Spotify on our phone, we’re using an API.
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 to access existing solutions in the market, you are free to focus your development efforts on the front-end and create new services that deliver frictionless customer experiences and differentiate your brand.
You can also use APIs to turn your own assets into a platform that can attract partners to build new products and services that bring you both additional revenue. For example, you could release an API that lets developers access your product catalogue to build interesting applications that increase your product exposure.
Here are just some of the ways APIs are enhancing the retail experience:
1
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.
Social platforms like Facebook and Instagram have launched APIs that let you sell products on your social pages. For example, Instagram’s shopping feature lets you tag up to five products in organic posts which consumers can then tap on to find out more information and make a purchase.
Using an API like Semantics3, you can connect your product catalogue web pages directly with a global database that shares detailed information such as brand images, product descriptions, product specifications and full product titles. That lets you sell more by creating better product listings and expanding your catalogue and market reach.
2
Voice and visual to boost personalisation
Retailers have long used APIs to personalise their websites and the marketing content they serve up to customers. Site search APIs like Algolia provide advanced search features to help visitors quickly drill down to particular products. Personalisation APIs like RightMessage help you organise your website content to better match the needs of every customer, based on previous visits and buying history. And marketing automation APIs like Emarsys let you suggest products you know they’re interested in.
Visual search APIs are also helping customers quickly find the products they want. The Iconic’s Snap to Shop and Cue Clothing’s Style Finder mobile apps use Alibaba Cloud’s visual search service to retrieve information about products that are similar or identical to an input image. Users can shoot or upload an item of clothing’s photo and each service searches the retailer’s range for similar looking products.
When 50 percent of all searches are predicted to be voice searches by 2020, you can consider using Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant APIs to further tailor the shopping experience and boosts sales.
3
Payment convenience counts
Deregulation of the banking sector and an explosion of new fintech startups is letting consumers shop online using many new payment options and mobile apps.
Payment APIs from PayPal, Stripe, Square and Dwolla not only offer you the technical, fraud prevention and banking infrastructure that’s required to operate online payment systems, they also give consumers innovative digital payment options.
When 25 percent of online shoppers abandon their orders due to frustration with filling in forms, you can offer a digital wallet that lets people transfer their information securely and accurately. These digital wallets are the payment method of choice in mobile-first markets like China.
If you’re selling in China or want to provide frictionless experiences to Chinese visitors, students or ex-pats, then include support for Alipay and WeChat Pay, the dominate digital wallet providers with 92% market share between them.
Consumers also love new ‘buy-now, pay later’ services, particularly millennials with an aversion to credit card debt. APIs let you easily offer pay-later options from providers like Afterpay, Laybuy or PartPay. The benefits can be immediate: Afterpay reports that many retailers have seen customer order sizes jump between 20 to 50 percent and retailers are processing up to 25 percent of online orders through the service.
4
Deliver anywhere, any how
Your order fulfilment process gives you an opportunity to meet customer expectations for faster and cheaper deliveries.
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. APIs from Shippit, Temando and Gosweetspot provide one-stop-shop systems to generate a consignment label, ship via the cheapest and fastest delivery service and track your order.
Your customers get the benefit of shipping flexibility, checkout customisation and other functions like tracking notifications and customs forms. And bricks-and-mortar retailers can gain a competitive advantage – for example, fashion retailer Cue Clothing uses its stores as distribution centres for fulfilment options such as 30 minute click-and-collect, store-to-door and 3-hour deliveries nationwide.
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.
By developing a community of third-party apps and systems working together in an ecosystem, you can reduce integration and maintenance overheads, enjoy virtually limitless scalability, monetise your data and continually innovate.
