It’s a tool for connecting all the different apps you use. What Zapier does is take two services and act as a middle man for their APIs. If it wasn’t for Twitter’s API, we’d all be stuck with just their official clients. They can do things like upload information, download stored data and otherwise hook into the app. Most modern web apps have an API (Application Program Interface) which third-party developers can use to interact with it.

I’ll start by exploring what is Zapier and what its used for, then outline how it can benefit you and show you how to get set up. In this tutorial, I’m going to look at the how and why of using Zapier in your business for better task automation. Connecting all these disparate apps and getting them to play nice together is where Zapier comes in. You could be using Slack to manage your team, Shopify to sell your product, Zendesk to handle support and a dozen other apps each doing something essential. All Microsoft’s products work together right out of the box but the same can’t be said for a random collection of tools from small developers. The problem with having all these different tools available is that they’re mostly made by different small companies.

Other businesses that have a different workflow, however, could find Trello too limited and instead need something like Basecamp that’s a little more traditional. Trello’s feature set is just what we need. It keeps track of every tutorial that someone is working on. For example, at Tuts+ we use Trello as our project management app.

Now, rather than paying huge sums for one mediocre general solution, businesses can carefully invest in specialised products and apps that perfectly fit what they’re trying to do. The days of “Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM” are well and truly gone.

In the last few years the number of tools available for businesses has exploded.

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