Five Reasons a Business Needs APIs (and an API Driven Strategy)

Accelerating reach for transactions and content

A third common use case of APIs is as an accelerator for content distribution and enabling transactions from a wide variety of sources. A special form of partner ecosystem, for media and content APIs, this means providing API access to content that partners, news readers, aggregators and mashup tools can automatically access and propel to new audiences. For eCommerce and, increasingly, brick and mortar retailers, APIs can enable purchase transactions via a much wider set of interfaces than a standard website would. An example aggregator in the media case is Flipboard, which pulls in content via API from a wide variety of sources — having an accessible API is table stakes to being accessible to the Flipboard audience. On the eCommerce side, companies such as Walgreens now have APIs that enable prescription filling and submission of photos for printing – enabling third-party developers to embed such features wherever and whenever it is convenient for the user.