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Having worked as a developer for several large retailers I have inevitably pondered whether a public API would be of any value to either the developer community
by tericho 12y ago
Having worked as a developer for several large retailers I have inevitably pondered whether a public API would be of any value to either the developer community or the business itself. The Gallery[1] offers a small number of use cases but I still have trouble grasping how upper management, as forward thinking as they may be, would see any ROI for the time and effort required to establish and maintain such a large, brittle piece of software. Not to mention the risks of potentially providing tools for competitive advantage to others in the electronics space (however few there may be nowadays) or a security slip of some kind.
At any rate, kudos to the team for trying to move the industry forward.
[1] https://developer.bestbuy.com/gallery https://developer.bestbuy.com/gallery
- projectileboy 12y agoThanks for the kudos! I'm a relative newcomer to the group; we have some great programmers and product folks who have been growing this for years now. You raise a number of interesting points. Our view is that by sharing our data, we can create an ecosystem in which third parties can make apps and services that make a better overall experience for the customers, and of course we hope that we'll benefit from that, however indirectly. The risks are relatively minor: our code is small and our team is small, so we don't cost much. And at least for now, we're not really serving up any data that you can't see on bestbuy.com, so we're not (yet) facing any large security issues. As for the use cases, I really think people are just starting to scratch the surface of what you might do with data from a very large retailer.