API Dev Ex Journey

When I had a chit chat with the business I'm working with, they told me often they see a lot of fraud transactions originating from one of the their  eCommerce B2C web sites. Most of the fraud transactions exhibit a pattern – either billing address or shipping address is invalid. The eCommerce site doesn’t implement  an address validation for billing or shipping address. If the validations do exist, without correcting the address issues a user cannot navigate to the payment page. So, I looked at some of the address validation services. As a developer what I did is relevant for any API seekers J

1.     Searchability/Discoverability of an API

As the first step, a developer MUST go to any available search engines and hunt for an API they are interested in. So, if we are doing any commercial APIS, it’s very important to make sure that the APIS are ranked properly by the search engines and it MUST bubble up when a user search for any API related key words.

2.     API documentation

After the API hunt, I found a lot of companies, UPS, USPS, Experian, Smart streets offer address validation service. Various criterions I used to weigh the API offerings from different companies are:

1.     How easy and fast I can apprehend the APIs

2.     Simplicity of API methods, request and response – From smarty street, most of the APIS, request and response object are self-explanatory. I don’t even  go through their API documentationsJ - I think the APIs directly talk with the developer.

3.     Try it yourself – After reading the APIs, the immediate step a developer took is to see the APIs in action. Some API providers provide a try it now link that  allows a user to test the APIs without logging in or without even request for an API key.
Able to try out an API without logging in or providing 100 steps of information is another key aspect of Dx.

3.     Integration

Another criteria I considered is how easily I can integrate the APIs to my application. For this, I look for any SDKs available from the API provider. Most of the companies provides SDK that supports various programming languages.  Another aspect I considered is, how often the APIs are versioned and how often the companies publish their SDKs.

Other aspects like, cost of usage (fixed vs pay per use), support …etc are considered. However, I wish to share the above three core aspects. Please share your thoughts?