Who’s Building your Brand’s E-Presence?

AuthorChris F. June 3rd, 2009 Comments View Comments

Scenario 2: Amazon holds most of the control over their offerings, but developers are given a lot to work with

At this stage in Amazon’s lifetime, it’s probably not necessary to give you their history. Amazon stands out in the industry of e-commerce because while their primary consumer touch point is a fully-featured website, they also offer a range of additional touch points including services to browse and pay for items via SMS text messages, native mobile applications, a mobile web site and countless other touch points.

Consumers are able to find products on Amazon no matter where they are or what they’re using; as long as the user has access to the Internet, they’re able to interact with Amazon to complete most tasks effortlessly.

Additionally, Amazon’s API gives developers a great amount of access to their data and, as a result, there are countless third party tools and applications that utilize the information to further enhance the user’s experience. The API allows the development community to take the existing Amazon experience to augment their own offerings, giving consumers enhanced access on top of a pre-existing user experience.

How does this benefit Amazon? By providing official offerings in literally every touch point, they’re maintaining the high expectations and consumer confidence users expect from a company like Amazon. The API allows developers to create utility and spread the brand farther than Amazon ever could. Still, through official offerings, users will always have a method of verifying pricing information or accuracy.

But both of these companies are special cases: they operate solely in the online space and don’t maintain a physical presence that consumers can visit, interact with and take physical materials away from. Let’s take a look at a more traditional click-and-mortar company who falls on the wrong side of the line.

Next Page: How one click-and-mortar retailer is really dropping the ball

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  • http://www.agencynet.com james

    good article chris.

    I believe that APIs, when done correctly, with the proper support, vastly increase a companies value in the developer community, and through them the public in general.

    A strategy that i find interesting is that some companies are limiting the API usage to particular vendors, in order to prevent over saturation of multiple applications that do the same thing.

  • http://flexewebs.com/semantix Jason Grant

    There is a big fight going on at the moment for the ‘developer community’.

    The Open Source scene has been hijacked by big corporations to harness the power of ‘cheap labour’ which feels like they are independent, while locking themselves into working with a particular API (i.e. Google Maps, Microsoft Search API, etc.).

    What this leads to is a new form of a ‘corporate lock-in’ which most people (bizzarely) call ‘open web’ it cannot be further from the truth.

    Ah well I could go on and on about this.

  • http://chrisfullman.com Chris F.

    Thanks for the input Jason! I’ve particularly noticed this trend in the past few months, which in part prompted me to write this article.

    I wouldn’t go as far as saying that corporations are “hijacking” the Open Source movement, since the nature of OS is to adapt it freely regardless of the end goal. However, there isn’t merit for a corporation to look to the community (”cheap labour”) as a means to accomplish their own internal goals. In the example of “Company-X,” I can already see that their goal hasn’t been met as I still haven’t seen any real-world deployments using their API.

    My needs for a mobile site aren’t there. If they’re not creating it (and they haven’t, in this example), they’re leaving it to the developers to create it. Nobody has done it yet (and I really don’t have the time to do it myself), so I’m one of the many consumers that are left out in the cold.

    Target and Walmart, on the other hand, have recognized the need to provide their consumers with a mobile version of their site, and I’ve used them often – even when I’m in their stores.

    The key here is not relying on the development community to do the work that you should be doing. If there’s a demand for your consumers to have a mobile website, for example, then you should be developing it as an official offering — not looking to the development community to do it for you.

  • http://flexewebs.com/semantix Jason Grant

    I agree.

    There is much to be said about the entire API thing.

    One of the main ‘thinking points’ I am rotating around these days is that the whole notion of an API can already be heavily implemented through things like URL structures and widgets and should be reusable in any context.

    My ‘angle’ of comment was based on the idea that even though a specific URL is enough of an API, big corporations like Google create an API instead to ‘get developers bought’ into learning the API and developing with it.

    Once that becomes a ‘trend’ companies start hearing about it, so they start buying into it and then the whole thing goes out of control until a bubble is reached.

    In the process of reaching the bubble bursting point many corporations start thinking along the lines ‘if we don’t have an API we are going to be dead tomorrow’, etc. etc.

    Same happened in Web1.0 bubble when ‘everyone had to be online or else’ and the same is happening now where ‘if you are not on Twitter your business is dead’ model is being taunted around.

    APIs are just one of the big buzz words which we are going to look back on in time thinking ‘what was the fuss about’. The same thing as what will happen with Twitter.

    Oh boy, I have really tried to cover every topic in one here! :-)

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