Faster Time to Commerce? Check Out Our New REST APIs

Ben_Wu_2By Ben Wu

Sr. Director of Product Management

 

Hello World!  Today, Zuora announced availability of a new set of REST APIs to enable faster storefront integrations.  I’m proud and excited to have been part of the product development team at Zuora that helped deliver them.

I’ve been both a product manager and developer throughout my career, and have even dabbled with both the Google and Facebook REST APIs in recent years.  Compared to earlier in my career, I’ve been amazed by how fast it is nowadays to build compelling applications that integrate with value-added third-party apps in the cloud.

So when I joined Zuora a few years ago, I was a little disappointed to see we only offered SOAP APIs that required a relatively detailed understanding of the underlying Zuora object model.  Not really like Facebook’s or Twitter’s APIs, right?

Yeah, I get it.  Our SOAP APIs are super powerful, and particularly within the IT departments of our large enterprise customers, there have been no issues with SOAP or the requirement of learning the Zuora object model.  They gladly embrace a bit of learning curve for the complete power and flexibility that these existing APIs provide.

 

But I’m really a start-up guy at heart, and in my interactions with this segment of Zuora customers, I saw some challenges with our SOAP APIs.  These companies had smaller development teams already familiar with REST, not SOAP.  And they typically had very specific demands from our APIs, all of which were focused on integrating their websites with Zuora quickly.  In short, they were asking for faster time to commerce with our APIs.

 

Well that’s what has come this month.  Zuora has introduced 22 new REST API calls focused on enabling website commerce integrations.  The APIs are use case-based, so they hide the complexities of the Zuora object model — in other words, one logical API call can often “do it all” by solving an entire integration use case.  We’ve also provided sample code, SDK libraries, docs, and a developer test console.

Sure, many of our customers will continue to thrive with our SOAP APIs, and we’ll continue to embrace and extend those.  But these new REST APIs will be a fantastic complement, and I’m excited to start seeing our customers grow their subscription businesses with them.  Happy coding!

 

 

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