By Arthur Lawida, President, commercetools, Inc.
When we discuss things like API first platforms or headless commerce, we often find the marketing side of the house running for the exits. The discussion seems way too technical and the advantages don’t seem to easily translate into advantages for their day to day jobs.
As a leader in this approach, commercetools constantly struggles to craft the message in a way that the business and marketing can digest. We are, in essence, a technical solution to a business problem. In this post, I am going to do my very best to convince people that API First platforms, cloud commerce as a service and headless commerce platforms will provide the single biggest advantage to ecommerce business people that they can gain in the next few years.
API First
Today, every commerce platform in the world has an API of some kind. What this usually means is that they have taken the majority of the things that developers want to do with their platform and exposed them to developers through an API. The API is an afterthought.
For clarity, an API is a way to get access to a platform from another application. For instance you could imagine an in-store kiosk on an iPad that wants to show customers things that are available to buy from the company but not physically in the store. The developer could write an iPad app that uses a platform’s API to query the central platform to see what products are not available and then display them on the app. This app might check products and inventory location but touch nothing else inside the platform.
