Retail Connectivity: Unleash the Power of MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform
Over time, retailers have understood that knowing your customers is essential to building a loyal customer base and standing out from the competition. In today’s era of online shopping, it is more necessary than ever to access and use data to transform the customer experience.
Nearly 32% of shoppers buy more from the retailer that offers a personalized experience than from those that don’t.
The challenge for retailers is to gather excess customer data and offer a personalized shopping experience. To overcome this situation, retailers have started investing in digital transformation initiatives that help create a 360-degree customer view. The initiatives aim to collect customer data in an organized way so that retailers can gain actionable insights.
The connectivity challenge
The fundamental challenge of having a 360-degree view of the customer is the difficulty of keeping the central database updated in real time, as customers shop across multiple channels and have frequently changing preferences. Manually updating data in a monolithic data warehouse is slow and error-prone as it cannot provide the timely, accurate, and consistent view of customers that retailers need to deliver a personalized shopping experience.
Some 56% of customers believe that retailers provide a disconnected shopping experience across all channels.
The API approach
For all of you who are not into everything technical, some of the questions that come to mind would be
What are APIs? How does it work? What are the benefits?
API stands for Application Programming Interface which is used to integrate two software components to share data functionality. API is more than a technical solution. It’s something you offer as a brand or service, as well as a means to integrate previously unlinked data sets. APIs allow retailers to create new business models that are different from the original ones.
APIs in retail businesses include catalogs, product search, order shipping, inventory, and recommendations, in addition to existing specific retail lines of business. When a customer purchases online, they are using multiple APIs simultaneously.
Let’s get to know a little about specific APIs!
When you search for an item online, you are using the catalog and inventory APIs. If you scroll down the page and see “items you might like”, it’s all thanks to the Recommendations API. When you choose the “place an order” option, it is the order shipping API that uses a geographic API in conjunction with the courier API to calculate shipping rates. When you enter your payment information, the Payment API is used to communicate with your bank to check if there are sufficient funds. And what is more! All this happens almost in real time!
How about explaining the APIs through an illustration? That will make your life easier!
By now, you must have understood that the Retail API plays an integral role in increasing customer engagement and improving the overall shopping experience. We’ll take the example of a clothing retailer to explain how APIs work in practice.
A customer walks into the store and, after trying on several sweaters, chooses a specific pattern. However, the color that she had was exhausted in her size.
You might be wondering how the API comes into the picture here.
The customer will go to the self-service kiosks and contact the retailer’s digital touch points and access real-time inventory data. You may notice that although the item is out of stock at your current store, it is available at another store near you. In this case, you have the option of having it delivered to your home, but since you want to use it the same day, going to a nearby location is a more convenient option. In this case, the store owner also has the option of not providing all access to customers, and instead only to staff members.
From the example above, you can understand how implementing APIs helps streamline business processes and provides a variety of options for your customers to shop at their convenience.
MuleSoft Anypoint Platform
MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform combines existing platforms with additional capabilities for API creation, publishing, and governance—basically everything you need to connect the New Enterprise. Everything related to APIs can be done with MuleSoft’s Anypoint platform along with exposing business data to mobile devices, web applications in a connected and secure way.
Here are some interesting MuleSoft facts for you
1.MuleSoft Anypoint Connectors are pre-built, ready-to-use connectors from the MuleSoft ecosystem that provide fast connectivity to thousands of REST and SOAP APIs.
2.Anypoint Exchange by MuleSoft is the exchange and development platform that contains the complete list of connectors, templates, examples and APIs.
3.Each piece of MuleSoft’s Anypoint platform is designed to stand alone rather than one feature in a giant stack. This means that you can choose the parts of the platform that you want to use.
4.MuleSoft’s Anypoint platform will take the pain out of accessing data, unlocking it easily and quickly with a built-in integration that offers secure and controlled API access with a one-click policy.
5.MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform is the fastest way to create, compose and maintain APIs. Instead of days, build new APIs in hours, assemble mashups in minutes, and make any necessary changes to the back-end or front-end with minimal impact to embedded systems and consumers.
6.With MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform, you can innovate existing APIs with engagement and management layers, and turn current assets into modular building blocks that can be easily assembled into new capabilities for future innovation.
7.MuleSoft’s Anypoint platform was built to meet any integration challenge, whether it’s modernizing legacy systems, publishing device APIs, or connecting SAP and Salesforce.
8.For years, companies have kept some of their most valuable assets locked away in databases and applications. Now they have realized that sharing data can generate new sources of income. One of the easiest ways to do this is MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform, which not only eases the API creation process, but also ensures that new APIs are found and used.
In today’s world, retailers must meet customer expectations and enhance their shopping experience, both physical and online, to gain an edge over their competitors. With technology improving every day, it is inevitable that internal organization systems will be able to share data now and in the future.
Do you want to explore the full potential of the MuleSoft Anypoint platform for the expansion of your business? Talk to our experts or visit www.kodytechnolab.com now for more details!
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