In 10 years Good Wine has grown organically from a niche corner to a huge wine store with a bakery, organic products, designer accessories, annual festivals and much more. The checkout process has changed dramatically: some prefer buying a cart full of groceries and alcohol, others grab a dram of whisky, and some look for a wine cabinet. Regular checkout counters no longer work for lots of use cases. We set out to change that.
Maxim Vasilevich - Finance Director
Artem Dulepa - IT Director
Ivan Kovtun - iOS Developer
Oleksii Drozdenko - UX Designer
Wire free cash desk wasn’t the only requirement. We needed a portable and scalable catalog with 10,000+ SKUs, ability to identify customers, apply automatic and manual discounts, edit weight, browse receipts’ history, accept payments with cash and cards, deposit funds and much more. Having looked through a bunch of devices and companies, we ended up buying Ingenico’s iSMP3m for iPhone. For us, it was a perfect marriage because we could get all the portability and security from a seasoned professional like Ingenico and gain an ability to customize the software leveraging Apple’s dev tools. My challenge was to squeeze a regular cash desk intensely packed with features into an iPhone screen.
Once you see the iSMP, you won't forget it. The device immediately feels familiar. That's already a huge win since it could impressively decrease the cashier’s error rate — one of our primary KPIs. The size and weight of the device should be considered as well. It is quite bulky, and there’s a limit of what you can do with one hand while holding the iSMP. The reachability of your thumb decreases significantly. My rough estimation is that heat map of a thumb reachability for iPhone 7 plugged into iSMP might look similar to the scaled down version of the iPhone 7 Plus. We’ll have to keep this in mind since holding the device with one hand and holding an item in another is going to be quite a popular use case.
Best practices
Before breaking the rules, we had to learn them first. We’ve structured best practices from Good Wine and come up with a long checklist of features and insights. Below are some questions we have addressed:
How should we notify a cashier when two exact SKUs are added one after another…or with a time gap?
How do we identify a customer and apply custom discounts? Should we connect directly to an account?
Can we add simultaneously two kinds of manual discounts: in percentage and currency?
What about putting a receipt on hold and serving other customers? How long should we store the data?
How should we manage compound payments: both with cash and a credit card? Paying with several credit cards?
What functionality will be available in the app without the iSMP? Can we use it offline?
How do cashiers usually add items to a receipt? Do they scan it, search the catalog by name, code, index?
Can we deposit funds using the same checkout experience? How can we make this experience faster?
…the list goes on and on — we made sure we didn’t miss anything
We went through multiple iterations and interviews with the finance department, store administration and cashiers — people who were at the core of the product. We’ve put them in the front seat and let them drive. It helped us define features that were used the most to make sure they are always easily accessible, while more detailed interactions will require an extra step. This allowed us to create a simple solution that didn’t overwhelm with information, yet powerful enough to serve in the most intricate situations.
Our goal was to give a friendly companion that won’t provide with an impression of a very technical product — simplifying has become one of our underlying principles. Surely we couldn’t afford to strip away our features, but we could divide functionality into logically related use cases and present them in a unified body. The key was finding the balance, and I believe we’ve found it. We've tested dozens of prototypes until we met our needs and quality requirements. Mobile Cash Desk 1.0 is ready!
Receipts history
The app's main screen lists all receipts chronologically with two statuses: on hold and paid. The headings are fixed at the top while scrolling the list and disappear when the last item goes off the screen. Each receipt’s thumbnail holds necessary info to identify a receipt quickly. You can create a new one either by hitting the “+” button or scanning a barcode/QR code with iSMP’s built in reader.
Search
When a cashier initiates a new receipt with a tap of a button, a search screen pops up. You can either find an item by index, code, name or by scanning its barcode with a phone’s camera or a barcode reader in the iSMP. You can perform any operation with one hand by swiping to the left/right or accessing the controls at the bottom.
New receipt
We invested heavily our time in developing a smooth workflow with new receipts. Essentially, cashiers work with a list of added SKUs and the summary. They can change quantity by swiping to the right or delete by swiping to the left. All alerts, hints, notifications and helpful information are constantly available before moving to the checkout.
Manual discount
A manual discount can be applied both to the entire receipt and an individual item. The magic happens when you see how those can be mixed. Moreover, discounts in percentage and currency can be applied simultaneously. We provide with an incredible flexibility and handle all operations under the hood.
Payment
The payment is easy as ABC. We take all kinds of credit cards, cash, and certificates. Compound payments are possible and are intuitively divided into multiple steps: once the first payment has proceeded — the receipt gets locked and cannot be deleted up until it is fully paid or refunded. Paid receipts can be copied to speed up recurring purchases.
Deposit funds
Good Wine organizes and hosts some major festivals where guests install an app with a personalized QR code — a simple wallet that allows paying in seconds by scanning the code and approving the transaction. Previously, depositing funds to those wallets was a major problem. We figured that with the iSMP we could deposit funds relatively quickly: scan the code, hit the predefined sum and proceed to the familiar payment screen. We calculated that we could deposit up to 7 wallets in a single minute.
Building an entirely new product from the ground up was a challenging task as we didn’t have any benchmark we could compare our results to. Yet, we feel confident enough to deploy and test the mobile cash desk in two stores to get an initial feedback. As we proceed, the result section will be updated — stay tuned!
