Best Buy’s Powerful Cloud API Marketing Strategy

Cloud API marketing is not optional anymore in many industries, especially retail, media and technology.  So naturally Best Buy—with retail customers who are very media and technology savvy—has pushed the boundaries of how to drive retail sales using powerful cloud API marketing strategies.

In the long term, Best Buy’s cloud API vision is to give consumers the power to buy products quickly and easily regardless of how or where they prefer to buy—on their smart phones, their tablets, their PCs, or their local Best Buy store.  To realize their vision, Best Buy started working a couple years ago with Mashery to tap Mashery’s cloud API expertise and technology.  With help from Mashery, Best Buy was able to launch their first cloud API’s in just a few months and with a lot of practical guidance from Mashery on best practices in cloud API design.  Since then, they have become experts in their own right with their own best practices for cloud API marketing in the retail industry.

Today, Best Buy offers cloud API’s that successfully serve two fundamentally different developer communities:  large enterprise developers and smaller “long-tail” developers.

Smaller long-tail developers join the Best Buy affiliate program to earn sales commissions by using Best Buy’s cloud API’s to build links into their apps that drive traffic to Best Buy’s site.  To serve these smaller long-tail developers profitably, Best Buy minimizes its support costs with self-service documentation, an interactive cloud API Test Console, an easy-to-use Widget Generator, and even a WordPress Plugin.  Developers power their applications with a full range of data from Best Buy’s systems, including stores, categories, products, offers, and reviews.

“Our off-line competitive advantage is our thousands of physical store locations where customers can get what they want without waiting.  Our API’s turn that off-line advantage into an on-line advantage, too.”

—Steve Bendt
Partner Acquisition and Business Development Manager

Larger enterprise developers like Citibank, Chase, and eBay earn a revenue share by partnering closely with Best Buy to get access to the Commerce API which includes all the cloud API’s needed to build a full-featured e-commerce system tightly integrated with Best Buy’s own internal systems.  Beyond just driving traffic, enterprise partners use the Commerce API to drive actual customer transactions.  With larger revenue numbers driven by enterprise developers, Best Buy can afford to go beyond self-service support and work closely with enterprise development teams to help them build and launch e-commerce systems on top of Best Buy’s cloud API’s.  These close working relationships with enterprise partners are now driving much of the innovation in Best Buy’s cloud API’s today, promising to improve Best Buy’s cloud API’s for both long-tail and enterprise developers alike.

But the most powerful part of Best Buy’s cloud API marketing strategy is not in how Best Buy segments developers to serve both enterprise and long-tail developers.  It’s Best Buy’s seamless blending of both the on-line and off-line activities in the customer’s purchase process that helps Best Buy stand apart from major e-commerce competitors like Amazon.com.

According to Steve Bendt, Best Buy’s Partner Acquisition and Business Development Manager, “Our off-line competitive advantage is our thousands of physical store locations where customers can get what they want without waiting.  Our API’s turn that off-line advantage into an on-line advantage, too—but not just for Best Buy, for every developer out there who wants to compete with pure-play Internet retailers.”

Regardless of whether a customer buys through a long-tail developer’s app or an enterprise developer’s e-commerce system, the customer gets instant gratification with in-store pickup at the nearest brick-and-mortar Best Buy store.  Customers don’t have to wait several days for a package to arrive as they would with a pure-play e-commerce retailer like Amazon.com.  Long-tail developers build apps on Best Buy’s cloud API’s that send traffic to the Best Buy website, which then offers in-store pickup directly to the customer.  But enterprise partners can use Best Buy’s cloud API’s to build in-store pickup as a purchase option directly into their own e-commerce systems without users ever having to leave the system to go to Best Buy’s website.  Best Buy’s vision is to offer long-tail developers the same Commerce API at some point in the future.

By exposing in-store pickup capabilities through their cloud API’s, Best Buy has extended its reach into Amazon.com’s turf.  With cloud API’s, Best Buy has empowered countless developers to make Best Buy’s products available on a limitless variety of devices, anywhere a customer may want to shop.  And by giving these developers’ apps the cloud API’s they need to offer in-store pickup to customers, even the smallest garage startup developers have a competitive edge letting them go toe to toe with pure-play e-commerce retailers like Amazon.com.  In this sense, Best Buy’s cloud API marketing strategy serves both to drive more revenues and to leverage Best Buy’s biggest competitive advantage against pure-play e-commerce retailers.

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