Infographic: The rise of e-commerce shopping APIs

When openness becomes a trend, API-based connections and function calls are becoming fashionable for developers and websites these days. API providers, platforms and users form a win-win ecosystem. For developers and website builders, API function calls can quickly reduce the development and deployment costs of applications and websites, and bring richer user experience. API is the new economic institution of the Internet. It is estimated that by 2016, there will be more than 300 API applications; 100 new APIs will join this camp every week; currently, there are more than 250 shopping and payment-related APIs available for developers to use;
The following figure is a timeline of various shopping APIs, which takes us through the historical trends of shopping APIs: In 2000, eBay launched an e-commerce API to help merchants and partners develop applications on the platform; Amazon, Paypal, Google, etc. subsequently joined the field; after 2006, social platforms Facebook and Twitter launched APIs; currently many retailers have added shopping APIs to their websites, and more are expected to be deployed in the future. The benefits of shopping APIs are obvious: easy and low-cost deployment of content on different platforms and environments, such as discounts and promotions; more effective integration with multiple touchpoints: mobile, POS, TV, etc.; more efficient marketing and customer service, reducing development and integration costs; enhancing online and offline integration capabilities.