One of the important developments coming along the line is the growth in the use and availability of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that help service developers and orchestrators get different applications to collaborate together. Get that to happen and many new services can be created, and that is what is now happening at an increasing pace in the retail business.
One of the latest examples comes from US-based mobile commerce specialistmobally, which has just published its mobile engagement and shopping platform API. This is designed to empower developers looking to rapidly design, develop and rollout robust and sophisticated 100 percent native retail apps.
“mobally is addressing the need for retailers to get serious about mobile shopping and to take advantage of the tremendous opportunity to present customers with a sophisticated and individualized mobile shopping experience”
The fully extensible platform streamlines this process by providing retail app designers and developers with templates and data connectors to deliver the fully fledged display, user experience and interactive benefits of apps on iOS and Android devices. The company claims these can now be created in record time and at significantly reduced cost.
The API can be fully integrating with retailers’ existing infrastructure and e-commerce platforms, including payment and shipping solutions. This should help retailers seamlessly extend the shopping experience into the mobile app environment, allowing them to build in-app functions and features that can be tailored and optimised to maximize loyalty, conversion rates and customer engagement in a way that hybrid or web-apps cannot.
mobally layers its improved engagement platform with a combination of mobile analytics, in-app user behaviour-based customer intelligence, and push-based automated marketing tools. This equips retailers with tools that can maximise customer communications and realise the potential of mobile commerce.
While in beta test the live mobally deployments have shown up to 30 percent increases in mobile conversions, over 20 percent increases in customer loyalty and up to 50 percent improvements in communication opportunities over traditional customer communication options.
The API is platform agnostic, allowing it to seamless integrate with existing databases and e-commerce platforms, including shipping and payment solutions. It is also available for cloud or on premise deployment.
It comes with a Design Studiotool that allows the design and building of native retail apps using web interfaces. Its design customisation lets users control every single aspect of the app to make it unique and tailored to individual customer’s needs, including the ability to quickly build and test retail app prototypes with full branding, design and functionality, to allow easy evaluation of the mobile retail channel.
