Retail APIs: Fueling Your Next POS Upgrade »

The world of APIs hit me in the fall of 2009.

At the time I was working for a large retailer in the entertainment business and putting together a mobile strategy to leverage our existing assets and systems. Ultimately, I was trying to make it easier for our customers to transact. Too many times customers would enter the retail locations and ask for a product only to be told it was rented out or out of stock. I knew for a fact that the product was somewhere in our supply chain, I only needed a way to get it to the customer.

Initially I thought that the ability to look up realtime inventory at the POS would be a good first step. At least we could locate the product in another store and then hold it for the customer. Better yet, we could make the inventory levels available on our website and iPhone app. Itʼs called "trip assurance" in the retail business; a very nice customer convenience. All this information is good, but how does the customer pull the trigger and transact, and actually get what they want?

The answer was right there in front of us. Transact in one channel and fulfill from another channel. The old endless aisle strategy. Use your e-commerce inventory to fulfill demand in the brick and mortar stores. The opportunities were endless - we also had kiosks and digital delivery.

The tenets of our cross-channel strategy were forged:

• Inventory
• Visibility
• Flexible Fulfillment and Payment
• Order Management
• Account Management
• Consistent Pricing and Promotion
• Item Management

We decided to leverage our e-commerce channel as the platform for the future. We built everything to be reusable. We built the foundation using an API.

Originally I was barely able to search my memory for the meaning of the acronym. An Application Programming Interface. An interface that can tap legacy and modern systems alike, an interface that offered a clean read/write function that could be reused from any and all screens.

We set out to build our API as a means to an end for our mobile strategy. But when we started to blur our vision, we saw something new: inventory, orders, payments, items, price, promotion, fulfillment. It was a point of sale. We discovered we could build our next generation POS by leveraging our new retail API strategy.

Mike Debnar is VP of Business Consulting at Sonoa. He comes to Sonoa from Blockbuster where he led the retail systems organization as Vice President, working closely with operations, merchandising and marketing to implement the company's multi-channel retail strategy.