APIs: The Difference Between Good and Great

APIs: The Difference Between Good and Great:
Internal commerce APIs promise the utopia of multichannel single view of the customer, on all devices that exist and are yet to come, with lightning speed, agility and ROI. But the reality is there are real risks when there is not a fully structured approach in place, and when the vision isn’t blended with the right business logic and usability right out of the gate.
In our latest webinar Business Challenges Solved by APIs: What Every Executive Should Know, API evangelist Kin Lane recounts an example of a large retailer who enjoyed strong partner relationship, stellar conversion rates and hardened control of their web experience. As soon as they jumped into Facebook and opened up their own API to developers, they found what developers built were not as tight as their website. Without the same standards, even partner relationships were in danger, due to contract restrictions.
The risk lies in the combination of lack of strategy and usability (developer usability and architecture) and technical limitations of the implementation itself. Without proper business control, potentially good initiatives like social apps can be killed off.

Join API evangelist Kin Lane and Elastic Path’s digital commerce strategist David Chiu and senior product architect Matt Bishop for a 30-minute rap about the gulf between the promise and reality of APIs, and the difference between “good” and “great” ones. Suitable for both business and technical audiences. The webinar will be made available on demand, and catch David’s recap What Every Executive Needs to Know About API Technology on Econsultancy.