Cdiscount launches a 360-degree marketplace solution based on Azure API Management

Overview and needs assessment

It all started in early 2020. Cdiscount wanted to evolve its API platform to respond to issues identified internally by analyzing support tickets and gathering feedback from its partners.

At the same time, Cdiscount was developing a new business as a marketplace solution provider, which required revising the documentation and publishing workflow of its APIs. The brand therefore had two projects to manage at the same time: an API management project and an API development project, with three key aims.

• Improve the developer experience
• Accelerate the onboarding of partners
• Increase the B2C audience
  
  

Choosing Azure API Management

After benchmarking API management solutions, settling on Microsoft Azure was a quick decision. “Our IT department was already working with several Microsoft solutions on this new project. We wanted to continue to benefit from this technical expertise and relationship of trust. We felt confident about working with Azure,” says Grégory Tall, API Business Leader at Cdiscount.

The complementarity of Azure solutions—and its policy system that provides the option to customize the tool according to needs—stands out from other solutions, which are often offered turnkey. “These are the real strengths of the solution. It gives us a broad scope of action, and we certainly have not yet explored all of the possibilities!”

A super quick start

The project kicked off at the end of the summer of 2020. Mobilizing Microsoft Partner Network member Cellenza and offering Cdiscount the chance to join the FastTrack program, Microsoft aimed for deployment of a minimum viable product in November. “As of October, a month after the project began, we had already implemented a very robust system that significantly accelerates delivery,” says Nicolas Barrasson, Cloud Solution Architect Microsoft. “This ability to provide support is one of the strengths of Microsoft and its partner ecosystem.”

An experimentation phase was then carried out in December 2020, with the release of a new API for a few pilot customers. Barrasson says, “Since then, a new API management solution has been implemented to manage new APIs for new users. The platform was expanded to welcome more partners and APIs into Cdiscount.”

Use cases and benefits

Overall, Cdiscount draws several benefits from the redesign of its API and the implementation of Azure API Management:

• Attraction of new developers
• Accelerated onboarding (now twice as fast)
• Increased performance
• Better visibility of partners' activities
• Portal customization that meets needs as closely as possible
• Reliable support, with expert partners

Overall, A great project that covered the entire APIM scope and addressed technical challenges.

A very positive balance sheet

In 2020, the marketplace sales volume reached EUR1.3 billion. Even more significantly, 80 percent came from sellers connected to Cdiscount's API. Today, the marketplace has 120 developers representing 1,800 sellers. “Some of these users were already partners working with us on the new API that we are migrating. We also have about 20 new partners working on the new API marketplace.” Cdiscount plans to continue its growth.

Next step: getting established as a provider of “marketplace as a service”

Based on the good figures highlighted above, Cdiscount continues to move forward and is driving several projects simultaneously to progress even further. “We are going to industrialize API deployment to significantly reduce time to market, which is a big challenge for us,” explains Tall. “With the versioning we're working on, we'll be able to manage migrations and transitions in a way that's much smoother and less impactful for our users. This will allow us to improve the developer experience, accelerate time to market, and industrialize the management of APIs.” The aim is to ensure that there is no longer a delay between the production and publication of APIs.

Cdiscount is also working to set up a third online portal for a logistics service business. Tall concludes, “We are also working on quite a few internal governance solutions. We want to visualize and think about the API ecosystem of our new entity called Octopia. We want our partners who are working on seller functionality today to be able to offer the functionality to new users.”