As e-commerce moves from web sites to mobile devices and apps, APIs are no longer just the sockets through which transactions pass, but are the primary tools for data collection and analysis, as well as the enablers of agility for the lines of business.

The enterprise applications ecosystem is no longer solely the domain of enterprise IT. Lines of business are increasingly demanding solutions at the speed and agility required to be successful in this new marketplace. Internal and external developers, partners, digital agencies, and others use APIs to build apps and power business partnerships involving expanding distribution and broadening market reach.

Today’s retail is real time. Real-time comparisons are being made—if not by you, by your customers, all the time. The importance of having frequent stock, price, and promotion data available consistently across all channels and applications is key to retailers’ competitiveness. Much of this data comes from legacy systems and is pushed around the ecosystem in flat files or even more manual processes that can disrupt the customer and sales experience.

For modern web sites, mobile apps, and social widgets to communicate effectively with back-end systems, and to prepare for fine-grained targeting of offers and prediction of all aspects of their retail business, retailers who are leading in the race are exposing their data and services, and evolving legacy e-commerce platforms via APIs.

Making it all work demands that the lines of business, such as marketing organizations, align closely with the technical and IT organizations.

Shifts in data and cloud technology are helping to facilitate this evolution in architectures in retail, because more companies have ready access to new technologies and therefore to the necessary architectural components. Forward-looking IT departments are establishing long-term solutions by extending existing architectures with an API platform designed for the cloud, performance, security, and scalability.

The goal of an API tier is to allow a large number of apps—from partner channels or new app teams—to access content and data from internal systems. Commerce built on an API infrastructure provides a layer of common connectivity services, protecting core systems from the chattiness of millions of daily interactions while performing authentication, authorization, and data services through standard protocols. API-enabled commerce infrastructures provide the following key capabilities:

• Modularity of common objects including customers and shopping carts

Most e-commerce sites have a set of common application objects, including customers, shopping carts, and catalog content. Historically, this information was stored in a database, which required drilling into the stack every time data was requested. Today, as line-of-business teams as well as partners and external developers are building apps, the data are generated by apps and activities at the edge of the enterprise—in the interaction layer. Objects are placed in the API tier for performance; a store locator can function faster if it doesn’t have to call back to a database to retrieve locations. Objects in an API tier can be pre-built for ease of implementation, but are customizable for specialized needs.

• Fast access to frequently used data


Frequently accessed data are cached, mitigating downstream processing needs. Frequently requested data such as price and availability of inventory is essentially pushed to the edge of the business infrastructure, allowing customers to interact through smart caches, avoiding slow, costly requests to back-end systems of record. Standard communication protocols, security handshakes, and authentication are all handled at the edges of an organization, without overtaxing or compromising core systems. Only when a transaction happens do core systems become active.

• Customizable rules of business

Data can be validated or processed with lightweight logic and combined from or distributed to multiple sources and services as necessary. By placing business rules in the API tier, decisions about who sees what information can be executed faster than if that functionality is buried farther down in the stack. Packaged, customizable business rules for access control and interaction flow are centralized at the API tier, allowing them to be enforced consistently and changed in one place.

• Expert analysis

Implementing a web site or e-commerce site today without deep analytics would be unthinkable. The same is true for APIs. The API is the application interaction channel representing both interactions and transactions and therefore deep business-level insights. As a consequence, every user interaction performed on an app results (often in a one-to-one mapping) in an API request whose payload is rich user activity data. This includes the interactions that do not result in a transaction. When analysis happens close to the customer—where the interactions happen—there is faster and more accurate analysis, while core systems are protected from the associated traffic influx. For any type of app, being able to collect and analyze this data in a single place at any level of scale is an incredibly powerful capability. For customer-facing apps, this is game changing. When implemented correctly, all customer interactions, whether via web, social, or mobile mechanisms, will pass through the API tier, which provides the single point of access where insights into customer activity across all touch points can be measured.

• Speedy, secure transactions

When the customer makes a purchase, pays a bill, or completes any other kind of transaction, the handoff to core e-commerce systems must be seamless and fast. API-enabled commerce can benefit from prebuilt connectors to common platforms such as ATG Web Commerce, IBM WebSphere Commerce, Elastic Path, and RedPrairie/Blue Martini. These kinds of connectors allow the conversation around the transaction to happen closer to the customer (in the API tier) instead of pinging the system of record for every request. These transactions need to be done securely within a compliant environment. Enabling direct interactions via APIs with payment providers is a key requirement of modern commerce systems.

As the main work of e-commerce moves from web sites to mobile devices and apps, retailers see apps as the new channels and the venue of conversations with partners and customers. APIs are no longer viewed as a socket through which transactions pass, but as the primary venue for data collection and analysis. Monolithic e-commerce systems that bundle all the pieces to present a web site, product catalogs, pricing rules, and commerce transactions (along with a built-in application server) are evolving and becoming new, API-based architectures to meet the requirements of today’s customer.

Apigee helps companies create and operate APIs and also offers predictive analytics technology.

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