Amazon.com In Reverse

Amazon has built a huge business listing everything imaginable. They have successfully built a brand where you know you can go to find anything. It’s a good move for what Bezos intended.

At Ed Wyse, I’m building the opposite.

Rather than bringing in small retailers to round out our product list and then competing with them directly as Amazon’s been doing lately, we’re hoping to be the fulfillment resource for hair salons, nail salons, spas, massage clinics, etc. that don’t have time to manage a web store. They don’t want to handle the payments, inventory, and/or shipping, they just want their customers taken care of.

To that end, I’ve been developing an API to allow our customers to host their own stores, branded their own way, with our warehouse and payment systems supporting them.

This has been a very large project. The original database structure was unmanageable. We have a challenge of keeping another piece of (cobol) software in-sync with our web site. And I have all my regular day-to-day issues that need to be resolved. It’s coming together though.

I’ve chosen django as the framework for a new web site. This allows me to build sensible models and build an API for them using Tastypie.

Over the next several weeks, various partf of the API will be made available to our wholesale customers. Check your account page for your UUID and API key. Once you have those, give them to your web admin and point him to our API development page, http://trac.edwyse.com. This will have some boilerplate pages that you can use as well as documentation for creating your own design.