Kite Print API
Deon Botha• Sep 28, 2015A quickfire show and tell session introducing Kite’s Print API & SDK capabilities at Mobile Photo Connect 2015 in San Francisco. We had to deliver the message in around 4 minutes so I spoke a little faster than I would normally. Unfortunately my colleague failed to capture the end of the talk so it ends a little abruptly.
Raw Transcript
Good afternoon everyone, my name’s Deon, I look after mobile development at a company called Kite and today I’m going to give you a very quick overview of what we do.
Kite is platform for businesses & developers to turn digital images into physical personalised products. So if you’re here today with an app that has lots of user generated photo or image content Kite can help you to monetise those users in a way that adds value by allowing them to turn their creations into things like photobooks, phone cases, postcards, apparel such as t-shirts and so on. And with any luck make a whole bunch of money in the process!
So what you’re seeing here is a beautiful collage I’ve lovingly spent hours creating in a third party app called PicCollage. The app’s quite a big deal, they recently passed 100M users and they’ve chosen to use Kite’s SDKs to help monetise their user base.
As a PicCollage user I have the option of purchasing my masterpiece as personalised product. And the Kite SDK shopping journey that facilitates this is what I want to show you today – So let me launch into it now for this creation.
By the way If Android’s your thing, we’ve also got an equivalent developer library there and a RESTful API if the SDK’s just won’t do.
So we’re now in the Kite SDK’s bundled shopping experience. Out the box we offer over 250 products, although we find most companies that integrate pick only a few key items that they believe will resonate with their user demographic. So you can see here only a small subset of our range is on sale. Phone cases, Tablet Smart Covers, Stickers, Prints, Canvases & Posters. And you can dynamically changing the product range on offer at any time simply by toggling on or off the products you want in Kite’s web based dashboard.
So I’m in need of a phone case so I’m going to walk you through the steps to order one of those. First I’m going to pick the phone cases category. Within this category there are a whole bunch of cases for varying models, I’m going to pick iPhone 6. We’re now presented with some beautiful product photography really trying to encourage that user to convert and also the cases’ price point. Price points can be changed in realtime in the Kite web dashboard. They’re also localised and can be set in a whole range of currencies. We can also get more details about the product if we want.
If I move on to the next screen I get a preview of what will be printed on the back of my phone case. I can easily tweak this by cropping and panning. If the third party app allows for it (PicCollage in this instance) I could even replace the image entirely by having the options to add new images from the Camera Roll, Instagram or Facebook. Once I’m happy with the result I can move onto shipping and payment.
As I happen to have ApplePay setup on this device the user experience transitions immediately to the payment screen as there is no need to capture shipping or contact details from the user – we get these directly from ApplePay. For users without ApplePay we support payment via credit card and PayPal, that checkout experience is slighly more involved as it requires the user to supply shipping and contact details first.
The product and shipping price points can be controlled independently. You can also generate all kinds of promotional codes in our web dashboard for your users to redeem on this screen. So if I go ahead and complete payment, I’m $30 poorer and you’ve seen a full end to end checkout.
Now I don’t really have the time to go into the details but we also do tonnes of smart automated stuff around trying to maximise revenue by moving the needle for a few key metrics that matter such conversion rate & customer lifetime value. And we do this through lots of A/B testing and automated CRM.
Finally one of the coolest things about our platform is just how easy it is to integrate. You can be up and running and making money in under 15 minutes. So it’s super simple to try it out.