Innovative Retail POS and Interface Solution
The highlights from this project were around the scope of the job. Being able to use an already established online tool and integrate it with our own purpose-built interface was extremely rewarding. Knowing that we had made life easier for not only our client, MyCube Business but also all of their individual entrepreneurs and sellers was great, and our solution was the perfect fit for their unique business model.
Case Study
MyCube Business operate a number of shared retail spaces, allowing entrepreneurs and product developers to rent a smaller space in order to market their products in-store. MyCube approached us looking for an innovative Point of Sale (POS) solution which was fully automated and allowed them to see data from different companies.
Since MyCube wasn’t selling their own products, but rather those of the entrepreneurs working from their stores, however they needed to control an all-encompassing POS solution to cover multiple entrepreneurs across multiple sites.
They also wanted to gamify this solution, allowing entrepreneurs to earn points for various tasks such as maintaining stock quantity, having all their marketing material available and keeping their store area looking good. This would serve as a way to teach them about successful retail environments while injecting some fun into what they do.
Process
The project was carried out over five-stages:
1. Research available POS solutions on the market to determine which one most closely met MyCube’s requirements. In this case, it was a product called VenHQ. This was an online solution which incorporated POS and could also deal with franchises, making it similar to the requirements of MyCube.
2. Setting up VenHQ, which could be used in-store on iPads.
3. Creating an application programming interface. This involved building code that could talk to the VenHQ system. We did this by way of creating our own website which automatically accessed all sales data as it was occurring.
4. Building reports, graphs and other functions into our website interface, allowing each entrepreneur to track sales, change product prices instantly, and access a range of sales reports both real-time and historical. Apps for Android and iOS were also developed for users to track their data on their phone.
5. We then built in the gamified aspect of the tool, creating points systems for different tasks and giving store managers the ability to tick off completion of the tasks. We utilised the data coming from VenHQ for a lot of this work, as it was cost-effective for our client if we didn’t need to develop everything from scratch.
Outcomes
We completed this project on time and in budget. It ended up being an extremely cost-effective solution for MyCube Business, because we were able to leverage a lot of our work from the existing POS tool, VenHQ. Since we didn’t have to build everything from scratch, we were able to provide the best solution without the client experiencing unnecessary development costs. Also, using VenHQ was perfect long-term, because users could get 24/7 support.