How to Create a Retail Digital Platform Strategy

An organization can create revenue by monetizing its APIs. This retail digital platform strategy becomes extremely valuable when the APIs are used to build new products, create new business channels and new business models that generate income or other measurable value.

As a whole, disparate organizations from all over the world that monetize their APIs, either directly or indirectly, have formed a new type of industry commonly called the “API Economy.” This digital subset of the world's total economy exchanges trillions of dollars of value every year. According to a recent report, leaders in today’s technological world realized over a quarter of their total revenue from monetized APIs.

Before jumping headfirst into building a revenue-generating API, consider these four steps to ensure a successful API implementation strategy.

Step 1: Establish a Plan of Action

The first step starts with establishing a comprehensive digital strategy that includes:

• Vision. Your results start with your vision and your capability to deliver value to your customers. If you know what you want to achieve, you have a better chance of realizing those goals. Make a solid plan, just remember that nothing is written in stone. Leave room for adjustments.
• Goals. You might have one grand result in mind, but it takes many smaller goals along your journey to reach the end goal. Define the metrics by which you measure success. Every small goal achieved is a great victory.
• Multi-year budget. To succeed, a digital business needs to be flexible and able to evolve with the times and this includes a multi-year budget. The Gartner 2020 Building Digital Platforms Survey found that most companies with over $5 billion in revenue spend about $5 million a year on digital business software and professional services.
• External Resources. Engaging service providers can greatly reduce expenses, and it provides you with the talent you need. Hiring experienced staff costs time and money. Many tasks can be outsourced with great results and huge savings to you.
• Scale and expand. Regularly revisit and redefine your goals and be ready to adapt to changes in the market. Technologies will also improve, so be prepared to revise the original architecture.

Contact DreamFactory with help getting a four-step retail digital platform strategy.

Step 2: Align the Culture With the Organization

The next step is to align the organization and culture, which means you should realign your company around the business capabilities you plan to introduce. Your APIs are more than just technologies. You have to see them as products and must be trustworthy, secure and designed for your target audience.

To succeed in the API economy, you will need a highly agile ecosystem that encompasses the various driving forces behind organizational constituencies (such as your team, independent developers, new and potential customers, business partners, etc.), your business models and the business channels you employ to responsively create and in some cases, co-create new value. Your APIs are the connecting fabric behind the agility of the digital ecosystem. They serve up the required data and business capabilities for the just-in-time system that empowers the ever-evolving, game-changing experience customers have come to expect for the most positive business outcome.

Get a four-step strategy for building a retail digital platform strategy with APIs and DreamFactory.

Step 3: Evaluate, Build and Deploy the Necessary Technology

This is a great example of what technology can do: A customer is on the first leg of two-leg light. He has become engrossed in a movie and wishes to continue watching it on the second leg from where he left off on the first leg. At the very least, to accommodate such an incredible request, the airline, the entertainment hardware supplier and the satellite server provider would all be involved.

This near-impossible feat has the potential of creating enormous customer loyalty, but to turn it into a reality is not as easy as it sounds. The technology does exist to make this happen, but the ecosystem hasn't been aligned to deliver such an outcome – this is a hypothetical situation, but eventually, it will become a reality.

However, when APIs act behind the scenes as the connective tissue, building this awesome customer experience – which translates to an indirect form of monetizing the API involved – could happen within weeks or maybe days. Technology that used to take years to develop can now become a reality in a very short time.

Using APIs to enable your ecosystem, combined with the highest level of full-cycle management, is the third step in the retail digital platform strategy.

Have unexpected challenges made it difficult for you to formulate a retail digital platform strategy? Reach out to the team at DreamFactory to learn more about how the platform can help. You can also use the DreamFactory Community to see whether someone has already asked your question. You might find that the question has been answered, so you can overcome the challenge as quickly as possible.

Step 4: Engagement With Your Ecosystem

The fourth step is about engaging, testing and promoting your ecosystem. Productivity tools and extensive training help to maximize awareness and the adoption of your platform. It is also important to measure your progress while exercising financial responsibility. Both elements are key to the success of your retail digital platform strategy and API program.

Build a Retail Digital Platform Strategy with DreamFactory

DreamFactory makes it easier than ever for you to learn how to execute a retail digital platform strategy without becoming a technical expert. The DreamFactory platform does most of the work for you, so you don’t need extensive training to create and manage APIs.

Start your free 14-day trial with DreamFactory to experience how much easier it becomes to build an effective API strategy when you use a reliable platform that comes with rock-solid security, instant API creation, and many other features.

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