How do you replicate big-box retailers online? Mashery has an answer

Offline, vendors recognize the importance of moving products as close to the would-be consumer as possible. Retailers, fast food chains, and other vendors therefore build physical locations all over the world, seeking to be physically proximate to potential customers.

Online, we still somehow believe that it's acceptable to build one store (e.g., BarnesandNoble.com) and expect the world to beat a path to the vendor's door.

Best Buy doesn't think so, and is doing some exceptionally interesting work with San Francisco-based Mashery to effectively replicate and extend the local shopping experience online.

The key to it all is the API (application programming interface), as The New York Times describes, which "lets Web sites make their content easily available to other Web developers, who can import it, display it on their own sites and mash it up with other material."

In Best Buy's case, this means making its product catalog available to the world. No big deal? Consider that this essentially opens up a Best Buy store on every niche Web site on the planet (that chooses to use the Best Buy Remix API, of course). Perhaps I'd like to provide detailed information about scanners that I want to sell. Best Buy's Remix lets me leverage its catalog (along with product reviews and more).

The next phase for Best Buy? Open up its shopping cart, as well, so that each of these corner stores becomes not only a place to browse but also a place to buy Best Buy products, taking a share of the sale in the process. Best Buy everywhere...even more than it could hope to achieve offline.

Best Buy, however, isn't alone in this. Mashery is also working with MTV, which suggests the following services with its API as a starting point:

• Build a music video gallery of MTV, VH1, CMT, or LOGO artists
• Create an application to send music video dedications to friends on Facebook, MySpace, Flux, or just about any other social network
• Mine our expansive music video archive to create the music application of your dreams
• Fashion a WordPress plug-in to dynamically pull music videos into blog posts

In sum, MTV's Mashery-enabled API opens up its content to the world to consume, with huge benefits going back to MTV as a consequence: visibility, adoption, and downstream revenue-sharing opportunities.

In this way, I see Mashery opening up the Web to development in similar ways to how open source works "offline." Mashery is helping to break down barriers between Web sites, enabling savvy customers to extend their reach far beyond their .com site to envelop and enrich others' Web services, and take a share of the sales in the process.

[softwaredesignengineer]

So I am assuming that as a developer, if I use their API to provide a space to their store and someone buys through my site, I get a percentage cut in the sales???

Can someone clarify that part. I mean, what's in it for the website owner?

[pjhenry1216]

I think its more that they're just given that content. Having access to the hundreds or thousands product descriptions, reviews, etc. without having to accumulate and maintain it yourself is extremely worthwhile. If its provided for free, then that should be the exchange right there.

[brainiac4]

We do have an affiliate program -- I posted a link to it in the Remix Dev blog: http://remix.bestbuy.com/blog/read/Affiliate_Program

I'm interested in your feedback on the program -- please take a look and either email me directly or post in the Remix forums to let us know your thoughts.

[benjaminstraight]

Good answer. Still tough competition

[JoshCatone]

I'm not sure I see the difference between this and any other affiliate program that has an API. For example, what Amazon has been doing with their ecommerce web service for many, many years seems more or less that same as what you're describing at Best Buy. Am I missing something?

[brainiac4]

No, you're not missing anything. :)

Amazon is definitely way ahead of us. At this point, Remix isn't different from any other program. The first step is for us to get the API out there. I believe we're ahead of many of our brick-and-mortar competitors, and I hope to be able to open up store-level information to be able to get an advantage over the online pure-plays.

Only time will tell, of course. I'm interested in your feedback. I'll be looking here and other places, but the best place (for now) to be sure that I'll see it is to post in the Remix forum. Or email me directly at BestBuy.com -- I'm kevin.matheny there.

Or Twitter me -- I'm @brainiac4.