3 ways to boost your offline business with APIs

New tech empowers companies as they try to build better products and services. APIs (Application programming interfaces) provide multiple ways to do it with ease and utilise third-party solutions – out of the box tools that save you time on development.

Though APIs is definitely not a new thing for online business (most of services have some kind of application programming interfaces – Mailchimp, Litmus), offline still lacks understanding of possible ways to improve business efficacy with such a convenient tool. We decided to deal with this issue and explain it in plain words.

Car parts search

Going online allows you to significantly expand your customer base and auto parts stores are not an exception. Web provides new opportunities as well as some challenges that affect the outcome.

Any store cares about its budget and tries to come up with cost-effective ways to manage its inventory. Most look for potential substitutes – parts from one vehicle that will interchange with another. That’s what parts cross reference is all about and stores are eager to get latest updates with high quality pictures.

Imagine potential costs of keeping a parts cross reference database up to date. This is exactly when third-party solutions (like Parts Cross Reference) come into play and help stores focus on growing their client base.

Field workers management

Mobile field workers really save the day when you or a company need somethings fixed, delivered or built. This model requires businesses to keep track of those who are late, skip woking hours and cause delays. They usually do this with the help of field service manage-ment software.

This type of software integrates maps APIs in order to provide visual tracking and delivery routing. CRM systems utilise field management software APIs in a similar way and fetch work orders, check-lists, lists of materials required, and other details.

This way even assembling furniture and cable management can be standardised at no costs and offline businesses can win new clients.

Expanding CRMs for restaurants

Running a restaurant business is not a trivial thing to do as you have to deal with issues varying from inventory management to employees giving out food to their friends for free.

Automatisation tools for restaurants are basically modules for taking orders, room man-agement, accounting and more. APIs can hook these modules up with multiple third-party products like customer loyalty management systems and help businesses improve overall service quality.