Ricochet Point of Sale
Building an all-new ecommerce platform for a forgotten industry.
Overview
Ecommerce has been growing exponentially over the past few years, and that has left one particular industry behind: local resale and consignment. With traditional retail stores, getting your item listed and sold online is a pretty straightforward endeavor. Platforms like Shopify integrate with dozens of POS systems to aggregate your pricing, photos, and product details in real-time to essentially build you a store that never closes.
Resale is unique in a few ways that make it particularly challenging. When you compare retail and consignment transactions, what is normally a pretty linear process becomes a mess of third parties and important business considerations.
Consignment has an array of fees and pieces that split financial reports between multiple people, convoluting pricing and whose hands get the pieces of the pie. A traditional consignment store will automatically discount items based on the lifetime of the product on the sales floor. Then they might run a seasonal discount, where the consignor's split suddenly changes. Or maybe there are products that are exempt from a certain discount, or have a different split percentage because they are considered high-ticket items.
Ultimately, the resale industry has been dramatically underserved by larger organizations when it comes to web access and ability to get your store running online. Ricochet, as a core POS and inventory management system to consignment stores had a massive opportunity to fill this need, particularly with the COVID-19 pandemic and the instant need for online sales.
Solution
We built a thorough ecommerce system that integrates Ricochet’s inventory and consignor management software to host your entire consigned and retail inventory online. This tool uses a variety of pages and new systems to manage your actual website, your online orders, your shipping preferences, discount codes, and other details of running an ecommerce website in tandem to your store.
Challenge
Ricochet has a unique opportunity to combine its inventory, consignor, and store management software together to create a web experience where users can shop online from their local resale stores.
There really is a huge gap in this industry. There currently is no way to integrate consigned items and sales into a traditional ecommerce system like Shopify, Squarespace, Megento, or BigCommerce.
Defining User Needs
I have been an active member of a consignment resource group on Facebook and put up some polls and asked one-to-one questions to store owners about their stresses and concerns about getting their store online. Additionally, I went through some reviews of our competitors and highlighted opportunities for improvement or areas of frustration for their customers and online platforms.
Competitor Reviews & Opportunities:
This review is a clear example of the complexity involved in getting items listen online. They proved that even "good" integrations from our competitors don't function the way they would like.
This customer had to "develop their own" tool. It was likely expensive and difficult to maintain.
Poor interaction or integration with Shopify.
Conversations With Store Owners:
"Have you explored the possibility of getting your inventory listed online? Especially since COVID-19 has reduced your foot traffic so much?"
"I have! I tried out Shopify because that's what most people told me to do. But I couldn't really get it to work with my products. I've even looked at *competitors name* and their integration, but it seemed way to complicated to get set up."
"This item is listed online for $135.00, but here it says it's $67.50. Why is that?"
"Oh, sorry. We auto-discount our items after 30 days and I just haven't had the time to go and update the price of it online. It is actually $67.50, that is correct."
Our expectations were pretty spot-on that store owners really valued having consistency and clarity between their products online and in-person. We were quite surprised to find that lots of store owners knew their basics about web design and digital marketing. They had clearly done their research but just couldn't pull the trigger to getting their store online.
Customer Profiles & Priorities
Shirley
50+ years old.
She has owned and operated a successful brick and mortar operation for 15+ years. Her store is not at risk of decline, but she knows that she needs to modernize. She may be expecting to sell the business or pass it on to a long-term employee in the coming years.
Technical Proficiency: Little to none. Even if a product is super simple, she might ask our team to "build it all for her." The day-to-day operations could be done by her if they were familiar and easy to use.
Business Needs: Maintaining a brand to keep her customers close and loyal to her store.
Web Priorities: Connections to Google and social media to drive more in-store traffic.
I feel like my customers are my best friends! If I were to have a website for my store, I want to to reflect my personality first and foremost.
Karen
35 years old.
She has started her business 4 years ago and is now concerned with its longevity and growth in an increasingly multi-channel shopping world. She doesn't have a website, but knows that it is essential to her businesses' long term success. She has tried working with Shopify, but was frustrated at the lack of features for her consignment store.
Technical Proficiency: Moderate. She has tried and given up multiple times on social media campaigns and various platforms like Shopify. It's just too time consuming.
Business Needs: Increase in sales (online or in-store) and efficiency.
Web Priorities: Needs to be easy to maintain and be a clear driving factor in sales.
I know that I need a website. I just can't afford to pay for professional help, and I am already out of time running my day-to-day operations.
Amanda
28 years old.
She is a brand new business owner building the consignment store of her dreams. She has had one year of operations under her belt and is actively trying new things to find more success. She frequently runs discounts, attends local business meet and greets, has a very active social presence, and is well aware of the digital tools at her disposal to market her store.
Technical Proficiency: Great. She is familiar with basic web language, and uses a variety of advanced digital tools to help her run her business.
Business Needs: Scalability, efficiency, ability to keep momentum going and bring in new and returning customers.
Web Priorities: User-friendliness, customization, affordability,
My business is growing and I know that with a good website, I can drive more purchases, build a more loyal audience, and improve my sales. If I am going to commit to a platform, it needs to fit my business perfectly.
Store owners really want to get online. They know it is important, but it needs to be easy and take as little maintenance as possible.
Framing some ideas.
A huge majority of the back-office work for getting products listed online is already a core part of the day-to-day processes of most stores using Ricochet. They already take photos of all their inventory, price them, write details and descriptions, and prepare their products for sale. All we need to do is organize that information into a simple format that is mirrored online.
There are three larger solutions that we need to build to achieve this:
An actual website builder.
- Beautiful home pages
- Mild design customization
- Product catalog
- Ability to purchase online
- Open for marketing plugins like Mailchimp
- Social selling connections
Order management system.
- Track all incoming online orders
- Prevent products from selling in-store if purchased online
- Aggregate all order details and customer information
Back-end settings.
- Manage online settings and preferences
- Technical details like Google Analytics tracking, custom fonts,
- Shipping preferences
- Payment processing plugins for credit cards and PayPal
- Changes and UI additions to the core POS software
Information Flow and System Organization
Once the website is fully up and running, the merchant is mostly going to spend time on the order management dashboard. This should be the first priority. With everything else, they will probably spend a lot of energy up front and then leave the website alone once it all looks good. All of the preferences and web-building components need to be seamless and extremely easy to use to avoid user fatigue, especially when launching for the first time.
Wireframing and Building Out Pages
Now that the team had all agreed on a layout and direction, it was time to take the next step test out our ideas in a prototype.
Order Management System
I had quite extensive personal experience with a few online order management systems in the past, so I pulled a lot from my personal experience to build out the basics of it all. I knew that I wanted to have a clear overview page with a table of all the orders during a measured time period. Doing so just gives you a really good visual cue of incoming orders and what the staff needs to do next to fulfill them all.
We would provide the essential details about each order on the parent table without cluttering. Then each order could be easily expanded for further information if necessary.
Once we had a basic idea of what we were trying to accomplish, we moved on to wireframes. With the order dashboard, we knew that we wanted to prioritize a master view that gave stores immediate feedback on their online sales. We would add a date picker, print and export functionalities, and then a detailed view for each order.
Additionally, we realized that the only real way to know there was a new order was to go look for yourself. So we mocked up a simple notification system to the main menu. This would help stores see when a new order was in without having to regularly go check.
Finally, we put all of our design standards to work and built the final prototype. Its operation was already quite similar to our Sales Detail Report, so we had hoped that the final product wouldn't feel foreign to long-time users.
Pages
This was a huge part of the entire platform. We realized after talking to business owners and reading about their stressors is getting online that starting from scratch is really challenging for them.
Fortunately, our client-base all has a few shared needs. They all need a home page, their products organized into a shopping page, a page dedicated to bringing in new consignors, an about us page for personality, and a contact page.
Because their needs are so similar, we decided to build the pages with premade content for them. All they had to do was make a few changes, change photos, and other core content to get started. Rather than giving them a blank slate and telling them what to do next, we gave them a website that was already 75% complete.
Alongside each pre-built page would be help articles and links to our blog for best practices, ideas, formatting tips, and other tools to keep the merchant from getting overwhelmed and fatigued.
Design
We had decided to make a major change to the industry and abandon the idea of "themes." Most stores when building a website already have a logo, brand colors, fonts, and other basic styles to personalize their brand. They just need help putting it together.
After drafting up a comprehensive list of necessary styling elements, we were able to reduce them to 5 basic sections.
Styles: choose their fonts, colors, and button styles
Logo: upload their logo
Navigation: choose between a left-aligned or centered nav
Header: Upload a hero photo with promotional text and a button link
Footer: Update their footer content across the entire platform.
With just those 5 components, a store could completely customize their website and make it feel personal to them without spending countless hours modifying and designing every individual component.
Shipping
Even when a small store goes online, many of their sales come from local shoppers. In fact, a majority of our users didn't even want to ship anything. They just wanted to be able to shop online and then pick up in-store.
For those that did want to ship products, we kept things simple by giving them the option to ship by weight or flat rate.
We would then expand on that with free-shipping thresholds, and preparation for a larger coupon code system we had been working on already for the core software.
Settings
Settings would be a simple page organized in to corresponding groups. Everything would remain on a single page for now. We analyzed our development list and plans for 2021 and 2022 and couldn't foresee any need for dividing the page into multiple tabs.
User Feedback and Prelaunch Changes
We released the beta to a select group of legacy web store users. Upon asking them about their experience and checking on their accounts a few weeks in, we noticed a couple trends and unexpected uses.
Only two of the three order statuses we being used. After talking with our largest store about this, they expressed that it doesn't really make sense for their process to have a "shipped" status. They understand why it's there, but it just makes one more step for them to take once an order has left the store. We removed this status and just left it to fulfilled.
Stores loved the styling panels and there was a massive desire for custom fonts beyond the core 16 that were built in. We had a Google Fonts integration planned for a phase two build of the software later in winter, but bumped that up the line to be a launch feature.
Outcomes and Lessons Learned
Since launch, we've learned a lot, and it's shaping both how this product continues to improve but also how we develop new ideas in the future. There are things that we learned about our team or customers, and then were were few good personally takeaways.
1. Our dev team is incredibly flexible and we can shift priorities really quickly when we all rally behind an idea.
2. Customers are really good at reading our support articles when we provide them in-context to the problem.
3. Even when it comes to web design, most people don't want more options. They just want a faster route to the best option.
Personally, I wanted a lot more out of this project. So here are a few quick bullet points about what I learned:
1. Building really good hi-fi prototypes helps your devs in ways you don't expect. Designers want beautiful products, developers want to be efficient. Whenever I would send a half-baked mockup to a developer, the more we would overlook subtle interactions parts that, when properly built, add up to a stunning product.
2. Radio buttons don't need to be boring. I read a great tweet by Steve Schoger, the designer behind Tailwind CSS, a while back and he mentioned that radio buttons don't need to just be little circles. It's such a simple change, but realizing that radio options can be full design elements really expanded my perspective.
3. Listening to the feedback of users is always important. It's so easy for me as a designer to just assume that the way I am building something is the best way to get it done. Every single user on our platform has subtle habits and routines that impact the way they do business. It's absolutely crucial to be listening to their feedback and building something that suits their needs, not mine.
Ricochet's new web store is a massive leap for us as a business and for the entire resale industry. We have lots more planned to keep improving it, building upon its foundation with new and advanced features, and continue being the architects behind the future of consignment.