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But external developers wanted more, so the company added the ability to access reviews and ratings for products, find a nearby store and check whether a product is available there, and purchase the item through the website or mobile app in question, perhaps with a single click if the user has linked a credit card to the app.
It's been a hit. The mobile apps ShopSavvy, RedLaser and Milo all use BBYOpen as part of their apps. The makers of the app get a commission on sales through Best Buy's affiliate program. Shoppers can search for an item, or scan a bar code, and get information on pricing from various sellers.
Of course, that might mean a customer using the app might wind up buying from a competitor instead, but Bendt says that since websites and mobile apps have changed how people shop, what's important for Best Buy is to be in the mix. "If we're not in the consideration set, that's a missed opportunity." And the fact that the API makes it possible for customers to find out if a product is available for pickup at a nearby store once they've purchased it helps provide a competitive edge over online-only retailers, he says. "Now you can search for, buy and pick up within a matter or 20 to 40 minutes."
Legacy data issues
The idea of an in-store pickup option actually came from external developers, Bendt says, and it took the chain some effort
to adapt its legacy system to make inventory data available through the API; the data needed to be reformatted to be compatible.
"The systems were built at a time before web services and APIs were in active use," he explains. "It wasn't built in a way
to expose it externally to the developer."
The specifics of how they did that varied greatly depending on the data source, but generally the team would try to expose some "snapshot" of the data, updated as frequently as possible. If the data proved useful, they found ways to make it available in closer to real time.
Getting existing systems to work with the new API was also a challenge at the World Bank, says Malarvizhi Veerappan, open data systems lead. Her group originally struggled with latency issues because their 8,000 different economic indicators were not all directly linked to one another. It was important, she says, to create a structure that could incorporate all that historical data and grow as new information accumulated.
"We didn't want the API to be a separate application. We wanted it to be part of everything else we did with the data," she says. "We needed to connect it back to our data system. It did require our improving our internal data system."
As the API grew, the team added performance monitoring and instituted policies to ensure good traffic flow. The organization also increased server capacity and added server redundancy to assure availability of the API.
When financial information provider Bloomberg LP launched its Open Data Initiative in February 2012, the new open API -- BLPAPI -- was actually version 3 of the software development kit the company had already been using internally, says Shawn Edwards, Bloomberg's chief technology officer. In the old days, Bloomberg customers were given a dedicated terminal that connected them to the company's mainframe, which delivered market data, news and analysis.