How to get a jump on new revenue channels?

kkleva
Participant V

I'm interested in the communities point of view on how best to get started exploring new revenue channels for retail APIs. Our API Team has been hard at work building facades for every aspect of our business allowing app developers to browse products, reserve inventory and checkout.

Now that we have the great set of APIs and have built out our mobile site and app, I'm still not seeing a clear path to driving new partnerships to squeeze more business value out of this incredible investment.

Thoughts appreciated!

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How do you help travelers that may not be prepared for the weather at their destination or they forgot to pack something?

I'm on a trip to San Francisco, CA in the summer. It should be warm....however, in reality the temperature can vary greatly throughout the city and with the fog it can make what looks like a warm California day turn into a chilly and uncomfortable outing. Ever sit in the bleachers for a 7pm San Francisco Giants game? It can feel like the arctic on certain nights with the wind blowing up off the Bay.

My flight lands at SFO from Phoenix and we taxi over to the gate. I turn on my phone and receive a message; "You have tickets to the San Francisco Giants vs. Phoenix Diamondbacks game tonight at 7pm. Temperature by the 4th inning will feel like 40 degrees fahrenheit." A combination of affiliate programs knows I've landed in San Francisco from Phoenix (if arriving from a colder location, you may decide not to text the customer), it knows the temperature at the ballpark, it knows I have tickets to the ball game that night at 7pm and it also knows my hotel. "Would you like to purchase a coat and have it waiting for you when you arrive at your hotel?". Your company knows me, you know my coat size, you know what styles I like from past purchases, you have my credit card information and all I do is say yes and pick a color. Beautiful! I have a coat ordered before I get out of my airline seat. I've leveraged open APIs from a weather company, travel company, ticket company and car service company to create an experience for my customer like no other retailer....brand loyalty. It just saved me at least an hour or two trying to find a store or having to buy a Giants sweatshirt at the game.....but then again, you could have a partnership with MLB to have a coat delivered to your seat at the game!

Here is an article on how a bank thought of a new way to drive market share;

Emirates turns health into wealth!

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alan
Participant III

Here are some ideas for Retail:

- Take control of selling on Amazon. Right now if you are a retailer with brand name products, it totally doesn't make sense that some other seller is selling your product on Amazon. By using APIs, you can directly update content on Amazon.com, and cut out the middle man. It will mean your products will be on Amazon faster, and you get more revenue. Also, you can control when and how products get released to Amazon - for example you might want to keep only the latest products on your site, and have the older products listed on Amazon.

- Create an Affiliates program with APIs - Right now display ads really suck from a ROI perspective, and provide a really poor customer experience. But if you have an affiliates program with APIs, you can enable really cool integration into apps. I'm not exactly sure what types of apps would be interesting, but if you are an outdoor company - I'm sure there are lots of outdoor apps that might want to integrate with the API rather than display boring ads.

- Sponsored Content APIs -> this is the hot thing in advertising now. Facebook and snapchat all have the ability to upload content instead of ads. There might be some progammatic sponsored content adversing you can try.

- Create a marketplace and jump into new markets - If you have lots of people already going to your site, you might be able to syndicate products onto your site from other brands. For example, if you are an outdoor brand, there might be the opportunity to sell electronics or even food that is related to your brand. By providing APIs, you can make it easy for distributors to list their products on your site.

- Messaging based retail store - companies like facebook are making it possible to create an entire retail presence through facebook messenger. Now that you have the APIs, you just need to create an intelligent ecommerce bot to communicate with customer. Voila - you have a new channel. WeChat in china is totally disrupting commerce this way.

- Integrate with Uber Delivery -> Same day shipping is going to be huge. Integrating with Uber lets drivers go to the store to pick up the product, and deliver it to customer under 1 hour rather than days. Something that you can do today.

Thanks @alan@apigee.com

Some good ones here that represent the obvious and less so ways for folks to get started. I agree, taking control of Amazon and Affiliates should be top priorities.

Integrate with Uber Delivery - I really appreciate this one for the 'out-of-the-box' nature. Since many retailer may already have store inventory and reserve APIs this could really help folks standout from the pack.

Creating a Marketplace - easier said then done and would likely require integration with another systems to basically allow app developers to POST or PUT /products verses what is common to only offer offer a GET. If your current system of record doesn't support adding products.... API Program owners might find API Baas to be a good product to enable this quickly.

I think Uber delivery in my mind is becoming a must have in the next year. If you look at Amazon, they are offering free 1 day and same day shipping for many popular items. There is no way you can compete, so having uber delivery is the only way you can leap-frog Amazon.

The marketplace idea is hard, but you should remember that you can use their Affiliate APIs too for populating your own product catalog.

For example, lets say that you want to sell a coffee subscription on your site, and it so happens that the coffee you want to list is sold on Amazon. You can still have a link to "add a coffee subscription" to the customer's basket, but upon checkout, add an extra step to "checkout" the coffee subscription. That would result in a opening up of Amazon's checkout, but you still get paid the affiliate fee for the subscription.

Leap-frogging Amazon was once only a notion of the Gods. It's amazing to me that in today's connected economy we can even speculate that possibility.

Marketplace... I hadn't thought of it that way. There are quite a few complementary products that could be mashed up into a retailer's existing catalog. Using this approach, for example, a retailer could callout to a third-party catalog using a single GET /product/search API facade and offer their own branded products along with those of a complementary supplier. I agree that checkout might get a little sticky but if doing so has the opportunity to increase AOV and customer loyalty it may be well worth the pain.

How do you help travelers that may not be prepared for the weather at their destination or they forgot to pack something?

I'm on a trip to San Francisco, CA in the summer. It should be warm....however, in reality the temperature can vary greatly throughout the city and with the fog it can make what looks like a warm California day turn into a chilly and uncomfortable outing. Ever sit in the bleachers for a 7pm San Francisco Giants game? It can feel like the arctic on certain nights with the wind blowing up off the Bay.

My flight lands at SFO from Phoenix and we taxi over to the gate. I turn on my phone and receive a message; "You have tickets to the San Francisco Giants vs. Phoenix Diamondbacks game tonight at 7pm. Temperature by the 4th inning will feel like 40 degrees fahrenheit." A combination of affiliate programs knows I've landed in San Francisco from Phoenix (if arriving from a colder location, you may decide not to text the customer), it knows the temperature at the ballpark, it knows I have tickets to the ball game that night at 7pm and it also knows my hotel. "Would you like to purchase a coat and have it waiting for you when you arrive at your hotel?". Your company knows me, you know my coat size, you know what styles I like from past purchases, you have my credit card information and all I do is say yes and pick a color. Beautiful! I have a coat ordered before I get out of my airline seat. I've leveraged open APIs from a weather company, travel company, ticket company and car service company to create an experience for my customer like no other retailer....brand loyalty. It just saved me at least an hour or two trying to find a store or having to buy a Giants sweatshirt at the game.....but then again, you could have a partnership with MLB to have a coat delivered to your seat at the game!

Here is an article on how a bank thought of a new way to drive market share;

Emirates turns health into wealth!

This is the best answer because you've describe how to get a jump on a new revenue channel using a real world use case.

However, technically I can't you give 100% credit because @alan@apigee.com provided the APIs we'd need to support. Our rich media Content / Affiliate Program API would need to support real-time geo-aware push messaging between our stores and Uber delivery drivers.

Also, since your likely to search Amazon first, we're going to have to make sure you are aware that we are prepared to actually deliver you a down jacket to your hotel for the game!

I ❤️ how APIs make this possible. Well... maybe if you are flying from Phoenix to Boston then catching a Red Sox game. I'm not sure about those Giants fans.

Not applicable

Have been thinking about this for a few days - you mention "not seeing a clear path to driving new partnerships to squeeze more business value out of this incredible investment."

My question, @Kristopher Kleva is where you are looking for ideas. Some of the best ideas may be found in unlikely places - consider your call center - they are speaking to customers all the time, solving problems for them, is there anything there?

Also, some of the goods you sell are not everyday items, say a canoe, are there ways you can explore - with your customers and partners - new ideas of ownership - that rather than buy the canoe, look for "rental" or sharing opportunities. This could extend to resort owners or state parks or what have you - effectively allowing them to create a highly curated mini-store on site - and then for customers who are members of, they can stop in at the shop and "borrow" the items they may need.

Finally, to @alan@apigee.com point above - the notion of enabling a purchase, anywhere - meeting the customer where they are, when they need it - are exciting.

Well I started off looking here for ideas ;0)

Unfortunately, sometimes when we kick around ideas of our future potential the reasons why that may not work dominate the conversation. The value we get from this open community is that the free flow of ideas can be shared without the constraints of reality.

+1 The notion of enabling the concept of a sharing economy within your customer base. I can also see a variant of this where customer could recycle/trade their hard and soft goods amoung a community of enthusisits.