Connected Retail Experience with MuleSoft

Written by Harini Krish

Technical Content Writer

Today’s buyers’ expectations are more than a transactional relationship with retailers; they want a seamless personalized journey that reflects the context of how they shop across devices and channels. The key to success lies in linking in-store software with online systems so retail sellers can provide a continuous experience wherever customers shop.

Our goal is to provide sellers with a new strategy and roadmap around how to build and implement a retail application network to strengthen customer relationships and ultimately drive revenue.

The retail industry is unique in that there are few other sectors which are so complex and varied. Retailers today are required to be multifaceted and adapt to dramatic socioeconomic changes. Not only has the retail industry gone through significant disruption because of technology, but the global economy, changes in working patterns, and new entrants have brought waves of change to the modern retailer.

Few years back customers were ready to accept trade-offs. If you wanted that exact green sweater, you would maybe need to wait a week, or more, for delivery. If you wanted a new dress, you would buy at your local store. And if you went on Gap.com, there were just several options for a t-shirt. Today, this is all radically different - a retailer must match consumer expectations on all dimensions, across speed, convenience, and choice. Customer expectations today are leading retailers to rethink the goods and services that they offer and are adding a multiplicity of new offerings to create convenience — and ultimately stickiness — for their customers.

To become accustomed to change, an innovative IT operating model is required for retail. Customers today do not have to make trade-offs for speed, convenience, and choice; and neither does a retailer’s IT. With a different IT operating model, you can have:

Today’s buyers’ expectations are more than a transactional relationship with retailers; they want a seamless personalized journey that reflects the context of how they shop across devices and channels. The key to success lies in linking in-store software with online systems so retail sellers can provide a continuous experience wherever customers shop.

Our goal is to provide sellers with a new strategy and roadmap around how to build and implement a retail application network to strengthen customer relationships and ultimately drive revenue.

The retail industry is unique in that there are few other sectors which are so complex and varied. Retailers today are required to be multifaceted and adapt to dramatic socioeconomic changes. Not only has the retail industry gone through significant disruption because of technology, but the global economy, changes in working patterns, and new entrants have brought waves of change to the modern retailer.

Few years back customers were ready to accept trade-offs. If you wanted that exact green sweater, you would maybe need to wait a week, or more, for delivery. If you wanted a new dress, you would buy at your local store. And if you went on Gap.com, there were just several options for a t-shirt. Today, this is all radically different - a retailer must match consumer expectations on all dimensions, across speed, convenience, and choice. Customer expectations today are leading retailers to rethink the goods and services that they offer and are adding a multiplicity of new offerings to create convenience — and ultimately stickiness — for their customers.

To become accustomed to change, an innovative IT operating model is required for retail. Customers today do not have to make trade-offs for speed, convenience, and choice; and neither does a retailer’s IT. With a different IT operating model, you can have:

  • Speed

  • Agility

  • Visibility

  • Security

  • Scalability

API-led connectivity has a proven methodology for retailers to increase the speed of the IT project delivery and close the IT delivery gap. This enables retail organizations to deliver on customer expectations and drive massive competitive differentiation in doing so.

Featured Resource: Using MuleSoft, Royal Cyber enabled a leading retail chain to offer its customer new insights into API-led connectivity. (https://www.royalcyber.com/resources/case-studies/seamless-customer-experience-using-mulesoft-integration/)

MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform was purpose-built to enable API-led connectivity. It delivers an unmatched combination of capabilities that allow retailers to realize this vision, including:

Full API Lifecycle Support: While many solutions in the market focus exclusively on API management, Anypoint Platform supports the full API lifecycle, empowering the modern API to be treated like a product than just code.

Security by Design: API-led connectivity holds the importance of securing and governing APIs. Additionally, every node, connection, and APIs are automatically registered within Anypoint Platform. This means that they are inherently secured. Anypoint Platform also offers unparalleled visibility into what applications access which systems. Finally, Anypoint Platform’s dynamic policy enforcement enables security and governance requirements to be changed independently of the underlying code, increasing agility without compromising on security.

Universal Connectivity: Anypoint Platform connects to any source of data, enabling rapid implementation of API building blocks. The platform lets users to connect any endpoint with pre-built generic protocol, transport and database, and application connectors.

A Unified Platform: Anypoint Platform delivers enterprise grade support and connectivity for the API lifecycle on a single platform, removing the need to manage multiple products, vendor relationships, and skillsets. Unifying the functionality required to realize API-led connectivity under a single platform and management plane streamlines development and simplifies application maintenance.

Flexible Deployment: Deployment environments are evolving with the emergence of public and private clouds. Anypoint Platform empowers retailers to write once and deploy anywhere - on the cloud, on-premise, or in a hybrid environment. Retail establishments can manage their networks in a single fabric, regardless of where the API nodes are deployed.

All these capabilities are essential to successfully realize API-led connectivity and close the IT delivery gap. Royal Cyber provides a unified solution on MuleSoft that has all these capabilities on a single platform, which is purpose-built to enable retailers to innovate faster in the service of a better customer experience.

MuleSoft API-led connectivity provides a means for retailers to transform IT from a bottleneck hindering innovation into a platform that enables the rapid delivery of innovation. Equipped with an Application Network, retailers can not only respond to today’s industry disruption, but put themselves in position to easily accommodate whatever business needs may emerge in the future.

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