MACH Aligned for Retail: API-First approach is crucial for retailers to meet growing customer expectations and remain competitive. This approach promotes agility, innovation, and microservices architecture. APIs play a key role in deeply interconnected systems that need to interface with internal applications, third-party partners, and customers. An API-first approach enables developers to have access to specific functionalities of external applications or other microservices within the same application, promoting reusability. It also allows for easy integration of new services and automation into production when new requirements arise, making it easier to adapt to changing customer needs. The use of APIs is deeply interlinked with the concept of microservices, enabling a bridge for loosely coupled microservices to communicate with each other. An API-first approach offers additional benefits such as avoiding duplication of efforts, reducing risks and operating costs, enabling new opportunities, and achieving language flexibility. It provides more opportunities when it comes to integrating and refactoring client applications and microservices, allowing retailers to improve and scale their IT offering in a fraction of the time.