API Basics for Retail Companies from Best Buy

by Kin Lane on 06/03/2011

Kumar Kandaswamy, Director of Open API Platform Business for Best Buy, spoke at Mashery's The Evolution of Distribution event today.

Kandaswamy offered some practical advice for retail companies that are deciding how and where to start with their API deployments. His suggestions included the following areas:

Product APIs- Make your product catalog available via your API is fundamental.
Store APIs - Give local store information including location and product availability is powerful.
Review APIs - Deliver practical product reviews in a usable way to help consumer make purchasing decisions.
Commerce APIs - Provide seamless purchasing and product fulfillment through at-home delivery, in-store pick-up, partner e-commerce sites, and web-based applications.

Those four areas just make sense, as they seamlessly bridge the physical retail and online retail consumer experience and extend the Best Buy brand in entirely new ways. While there may be other innovative ways that retailers can utilize APIs, these are a great place to start.