Lightspeed Commerce Streamlines API Governance and Accelerates Onboarding with Postman

• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

• Consumer Goods
• Retail

• Product Research & Development
• Quality Assurance

• Time Sensitive Networking
• Visual Quality Detection

• System Integration
• Testing & Certification

Lightspeed Commerce, a provider of cloud-based point of sale platform for the retail and hospitality industries, was facing challenges in implementing an API-first strategy due to inconsistent API tooling, standards, and processes across their multiple development teams. The company, with teams across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, serving businesses in over 100 countries, recognized the benefits of an API-first strategy for easier collaboration and exposing internal functionality to partners. However, the transition was proving difficult. The Hospitality team, working primarily with external partners, was particularly affected. They needed to accelerate their API development cycle and improve quality, as reliance on legacy manual processes had led to slow feedback cycles, unclear onboarding path for new developers, and inconsistent quality.

Lightspeed Commerce is a leading provider of an all-in-one, cloud-based point of sale platform for the retail and hospitality industries. The company offers solutions tailored to the needs of specific industry sectors, such as golf courses and pet retail. Lightspeed enhances its offering by integrating with a network of partners, including OpenTable, Worldpay, and BlueCheck ID verification. With teams across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, Lightspeed serves businesses in over 100 countries. The company's Hospitality team is one of the many within the company that uses the Postman API Platform to deliver faster onboarding and improved reliability for both their public and partner APIs.

Lightspeed Commerce turned to the Postman API Platform to address these challenges. The Hospitality team started by creating a single source of truth for their APIs using Postman Collections. This allowed them to organize and distribute their various internal, partner, and public APIs, providing an easy way for colleagues and partners to explore and work with their APIs. This move also laid the groundwork for the cultural and tooling shift required by the company's API-first strategy. The team also used Postman's Collection Runner to run queries against their APIs, dramatically reducing the delay between a developer creating new functionality and the product team validating its quality. Other teams within the company are using Postman's API documentation tool to collaborate on and publish documentation for their APIs.

• The use of Postman Collections has led to significant improvements in Lightspeed's API development process. It has streamlined the onboarding process for new developers, both internal and external, making it more consistent and less time-consuming. Developers can now discover and explore APIs independently, which has also improved the recruitment process. The use of Postman has also reduced the time it takes to QA code, enabling immediate visibility into changes in real time and allowing testers and the product manager to independently validate new functionality against product specifications. The team can also share APIs with partners to track development and ensure API functionality meets their expectations. Furthermore, Postman has helped Lightspeed strengthen API governance across different teams by providing easy access to APIs in one central location, making the company's API standards highly visible and providing easily accessible examples to developers starting new projects.

• 20% faster developer onboarding

• 30% improvement in testing and QA times

• Enhanced reliability through stronger governance