Modern POS with Composable Commerce
Modern Point of Sale
The in-store experience is moving on from the traditional cash register and card reader to modern applications that can be run on a multitude of devices and integrate all your other customer touchpoints.
Technology is driving the evolution of POS and bringing long awaited features that businesses have utilised over the years on their websites and yearned for in-store. It is critical retailers keep up with the technological advances of POS and leverage all it has to offer to make their customers feel special.
There is now a whole range of options that can be offered to a customer in-store, these are just a few of the possibilities:
Self-service kiosks. Customers no longer have to wait in long lines to finalise their purchase. Now you can have multiple tills all running with one sales associate as an escalation point to help as needed while customers help themselves. Items can be scanned or just placed in a bucket reader utilising the exact same RFID tags as your loss prevention initiatives.
Endless aisle. This expands a store's inventory beyond what is physically available in the store. The customer can use interactive displays to select items that are not currently in stock in-store. That item they loved that was a size too big in the fitting room? It can be immediately ordered for home delivery reducing the risk they forget later. It also gives your data insights team greater visibility in your customer behaviour, instead of just being a customer that purchased through the mobile app you can see the value your brick-and-mortar stores may be quietly bringing.
Mixed baskets. The items in a basket can be made up of in-store and online purchases. Baskets can be transferred between online and offline channels. Maybe a customer doesn’t want to carry bags around all day? Not to worry they can start their bag in-store and then finalise it online for delivery all under the same account. At checkout the blazer you’ve purchased is part of a matching set? The trousers can be added to the transaction as an online purchase.
Clienteling. Build long-term relationships with customers through a personalised services. Customers can join loyalty programs and gain rewards for their purchases wherever they are interacting with you. Got a birthday loyalty points bonus? You can also come in-store to use it as well as using it online. 20% off sale preview for your VIP customers? They can get the same perk in-store easily with their customer profile accessible in-store and online.
Mobile kiosk apps. Sales Associates are no longer tied to a fixed POS system to support customers and sales for your business. They can complete transactions on the go using mobile POS applications run on a mobile device with small, lightweight and portable card readers. Customer trying on shoes in the shoe section and in a rush to pay and leave? They can pay right there and continue their day without having to queue.
Future Commerce
Traditionally legacy POS systems have been powered by monolithic on-prem systems, delivering minimal business value and suppressing innovation. Modern POS requires many of the features already offered by retailers online. What is the solution? Combine both technology stacks and support one lean, agile, cloud-based, headless, and cost-effective system that supports future innovation. Composable commerce is ideally suited to supporting this requirement. All the benefits that come with composable commerce for online sales can be realised in-store. These composable systems support fast-moving businesses and allow them to innovate at speed. This is key to being successful at modern POS.
It is much easier and cheaper for a business to support one modern composable commerce system that supports online and in-store than, two separate systems. Many of the features that have been available online can then be brought into the store. Personalisation, loyalty, and flexible promotions can all be worked on remotely and applied in-store. It becomes much easier to combine baskets, have mixed baskets and endless aisles in-store, and online purchases with collect in-store or buy online offerings and return in-store. Also when new features launch they are available everywhere, meaning the customer journey is consistent on all channels allowing harmonised retail.
Cabiri Modern POS with composable commerce Case Study
Our work with River Island is a good example of how in-store and online commerce can work seamlessly on a composable commerce stack. River Island's initial requirement was to introduce composability into their commerce solution. Cabiri and River Island worked together to build a composable checkout integrating commercetools as the checkout engine, Talon.one for promotions and customer segmentation, and Stripe for payments.
Midway through the project River Island started conversations with Mercaux to deliver an in-store self-service solution. Due to the future vision around mixed baskets and endless aisles, the new checkout services seemed the logical place to integrate with instead of heavily customising the existing and rigid traditional POS system with many limitations. The flexibility of the composable stack made it easy to incorporate the new channel. There were differences between the online and in-store channels, stock checking, payments and fulfilment, but essentially the orders flowed through the same services.
The solution was deployed in a serverless fashion, in the cloud meaning releasing code took minutes, with zero downtime and there was always the safety net of a quick rollback if needed. All the functionality was exposed to the front ends, desktop, mobile and native mobile apps, via a consistent GraphQL server. The system had an established and fully automated regression and integration testing coverage embedded in everything delivered. It was easy to cover the new in-store scenarios and this allowed change and innovation to be rapidly applied to the stack without worry.
David Edwards - Cabiri was the driving force behind our tech vision of moving to a MACH architecture. They were collaborative and worked with us through every stage of the project, partnering to make decisions that fit in with our roadmap and the ecosystem. It was quick and easy to leverage and extended our new commerce platform for self-serve POS in 6 weeks.
The project was a success and delivered within the tight deadlines driven by the upcoming peak sale period. The feedback from customers was very positive about the Mercaux self-serve terminals and the new store experience. In-store customers were able to experience Talon.one promotions. River Island was able to get a return on their existing investment in their composable checkout stack and commercetools.
