The two secrets of a unified commerce strategy

The retail sector is facing a number of major challenges today. Consumers have increasingly high expectations of the service level provided by retailers. For instance, consumers expect a seamless transition when placing an order with their smartphone and then wish to follow up on it in the webshop on their PC or tablet. 

Moreover, consumers also expect that store personnel are well-informed and can assist with online orders as well as provide tailored offers, promotions, and recommendations instead of generic advertising. 

Additionally, retailers must collaborate more with other parties to expand their customer reach and thus increase revenue. If they do not, competitors will seize their customers. Think of partnerships with large online retail platforms such as bol.com, Zalando, or Amazon. Fortunately, retailers have two ways to meet all these challenges, namely APIs and event-driven architectures.

The API revolution has been underway for some time now, and it's understandable why: APIs facilitate integration between applications across departments and enable collaboration with external business partners. This allows access to larger and new market segments. Additionally, APIs are essential for supporting an omnichannel customer experience and promote innovation as they can be used as building blocks for new innovative applications.

What is needed for a successful API story? First and foremost, it is important to start from a well-thought-out API strategy, based on the objectives: what you, as a retailer, wish to achieve with the help of APIs. The API strategy will then determine the API portfolio: which data or functionality should you make available as an API to achieve your goals? Only then can you begin designing and developing your APIs. All of this, of course, in accordance with the applicable best practices and guidelines.

Finally, an API management platform is now an indispensable component in any successful API journey. This platform allows APIs to be made available and managed in a controlled and secure manner. It acts as the gateway for API consumers and provides highly valuable insights into the usage and performance of your APIs through customizable dashboards. These insights are essential to measure the extent to which the set objectives are being met and where adjustments may need to be made.

Instead of viewing a retail IT system as an organisation of synchronous API calls, it can also be modelled as a chain of events. Rather than designing applications that tell other applications what to do and waiting for a response, they can also be designed to notify other applications via events about what has happened, allowing those applications to decide for themselves how to respond. This is the essence of an event-driven architecture, resulting in a more flexible, scalable IT landscape.

Event-driven architecture is, of course, not new. The concept has been around for decades. So why has interest in this form of architecture surged in recent years? In one word: Kafka. This so-called event streaming platform, originally developed by LinkedIn but now open source, offers a number of features that enable unprecedented new scenarios and use cases. Kafka allows events to be stored indefinitely and event streams to be manipulated within the platform. 

Because of these unique features, you can implement use cases with Kafka that were previously too difficult, too expensive, or simply impossible: real-time inventory management, modernising legacy IT, supporting a microservices architecture, fraud detection, and much more. These use cases allow retailers to increase their revenue by enhancing the customer experience, reduce costs by improving operational efficiency, and minimise risks through better compliance with current regulations.

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