Omnichannel: How We Did It For Real

Omnichannel generally means the shopping experience is unified and seamless whether you do it on your laptop, in-store, through your phone, etc. The team at Acro Media set out to demonstrate just how easy it is to give your customers a true omnichannel experience using Drupal and Drupal Commerce.

The omnichannel setup

As part of our demo at DrupalCon in Nashville, we did a pseudo-T-shirt pre-order. Before the conference, attendees could use our Urban Hipster ecommerce demo site to pre-order a Drupal Commerce shirt in their size. When they completed their pre-order, they got an order number to bring with them to our booth. 

People who didn't pre-order could also come to our booth and "purchase" (for free) a T-shirt using a self-serve kiosk running the same demo site. 

So one side of the booth was set up as the cashier/fulfillment area. The other side had the self-serve kiosk. We also had other laptops available so that we could bring up the admin interface as if we were a customer support person assisting a customer over the phone. The "support person" could find the customer's order number or email address and fulfill the order. Easy peasy.

The whole time, our inventory of shirt sizes was counting down until the stock count hit 0. When our inventory reached 0 for a certain size, orders for that size could no longer be placed.

Why is this so amazing?

Some people were impressed but also a little puzzled, thinking that this sort of setup should just exist everywhere. Which it should, but it doesn't.

With most retail stores, the online and in-store experiences are completely separate. They might as well be two different companies. If you buy something online and try to return it in-store, it often can't happen. Loyalty points often don't transfer. The list goes on. Some places will let you buy online and pick up in-store, but there might be a delay. They might say sure, you can pick it up in-store, but not for 24 hours. In that case, you might as well just go to the store and find it yourself. Even knowing if an item is in stock can be tricky. The website might say there are three left, but that's just a snapshot from a certain point in time, and you don't know how often that gets updated. Maybe that was valid six hours ago, but that item has since sold out.

Why Drupal rocks

What makes Drupal so cool is that the point of sale and the Commerce module both use the same orders. A point of sale order is just a Drupal Commerce order. It has some specifics to the point of sale, but it can be loaded up in a regular interface. They use the same stock, the same products, everything. This is surprisingly rare. A lot of POS systems in particular are very antiquated. They date from pre-Internet times and have no concept of syncing up with things.

But we've created a true omnichannel experience. We've done it, and implemented it, and it's all open source and freely available. Anyone else could set up the same omnichannel setup that we did. We used a laptop, a cash drawer, a couple of iPads, nothing too fancy.

What's more, as the software matures, we're working on an even better demo with more smoothed-out features, better integration, a nicer interface, etc. Stay tuned.

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Let's talk omnichannel!

We're always happy to help you understand how to deliver a true omnichannel experience for your customers. Contact us today to talk to one of our business development experts.