Digital Retail Solutions

From fashion retailers to supermarkets, the retail industry is very diverse, but also highly competitive, fast-paced, and full of challenges. And with operating costs continuing to rise and margins under pressure, business owners don’t need added uncertainty about their digital retail solutions capability.

Our client, a Swiss provider of Point-of-Sale and connected commerce solutions plans to provide a suite of independent microservices that could transform any legacy or cloud-based POS system the retailer is using into an omnichannel POS without heavy investments of a full migration.

The retailer can add as many services as they really need (gift cards, loyalty system, product and order management and many more) in a flexible non-disruptive cost-effective way.

Since the foundation in early 1999, Lime-Tec has been developing its software and hardware products with retailers in mind. At every stage of development, their customers participate, so that the products and services are always geared to the real needs of the users.

Supported by industry-leading hardware, networking, and support, Lime-Tec is providing POS software, cashier register, self-checkout, and innovative solutions that support growth for the fashion, footwear, and jewelry store owners.

Since the main idea was to provide a suite of independent microservices for digital retail that could transform any current POS system the retailer is using into an omnichannel retail solution, there were a few challenges that our developers had to resolve:

• The integration with the client’s POS software, or any other eCommerce platform
• High scalability when needed
• Complete independence of digital retail solutions that could be switched on and off without disrupting the operating POS

Due to the fact that there is no formal definition of microservice architecture, we can describe it as the method of developing software systems and applications utilizing independent, small, modular and loosely associated services.  Each microservice is developed and deployed independently which ensures that the failure of one microservices will not cause other services to fail. Different languages can be used to write different services.

After carefully analyzing the project requirements the team decided to go with Domain-Driven Design (DDD). It posed quite a challenge since DDD technical rules and patterns have a steep learning curve, however, it provided a lot of advantages as well.

The advantages of developing microservices for omnichannel POS, following DDD include:

• Creating a shared common understanding of a complex business domain, which helps with the entire process of digital retail solutions development and support.
• Development of a “ubiquitous language” based on business domain technical terms that greatly facilitates communication between domain experts, designers, and developers and permeates all the areas of the project development.
• Using a set of building blocks and patterns to ultimately obtain a well-structured and understandable domain model in the code.
• DDD is primarily not technical, but about communication and knowledge. The application of DDD is done in very different ways, but there are some well-fitting architectural styles, such as event sourcing or CQRS, which support the DDD concept.

Communication between these independent services that run their own processes is achieved via a lightweight but well-defined mechanism. The software microservices are hosted on the next-generation platform, Microsoft Azure Service Fabric, designed to facilitate the development, deployment, and management of highly scalable and customizable applications for the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

Process payments, manage inventory, create loyal customers and more with these highly scalable digital retail solutions.

Loyalty system

We have delivered an intuitive, efficient and easy loyalty software that helps a user build and manage a community of loyal customers. We help the retailers manage to return customers, attract new ones and track every single activity of the loyalty program. With this omnichannel POS service, midsize to enterprise level companies can engage & stay connected with channel partners and B2C customers to drive more sales and to create brand advocacy.

Vouchers

The software allows the organizations and developers to easily integrate and use vouchers discounts and offers service without much complexity. It empowers marketers to enhance customer acquisition, conversion, and retention campaigns with personalized incentives. You can create product-specific offers delivering promotions in the right context and time. With voucher service, a user can develop a powerful omnichannel incentive engine to drive the best customer experience.

Gift Cards

This Gift Card POS service helps build a powerful gift cards system for chain stores to let customers buy gift vouchers, send them to their friends or simply use them. Now it’s easy to proactively run a gift card campaign to boost sales. Customers can use their gift voucher as a payment method when they check out.

Product Management

The microservice allows retailers to add new products, group them into categories and brands. You can also update sales prices and offers, specify information on the vendor, add barcodes, descriptions, item groups, size and color information, purchase price. It allows a shop owner to have a clear overview of the products and increase sales. Easily manage and update products, prices and offers from the back-office.

Process Management

Since each retail service is by its design independently deployable and compassable, we developed the process management module that allows implementing a lightweight mechanism of communication between services. You can define and program all the business processes for all independent retail services to serve a specific business goal.

Order Management

The OMS redefines order handling by seamlessly networking all systems. All your sales and purchase orders, inventory, supplier and customer data synced and fully integrated into one system.

Payment Management

Lime-Tec’s B2C payment service automates the tedious processes like calculating VAT, currency rate, etc. The store staff can see account balance, payments, and payouts history all on a single dashboard.

Abto Software provides innovative technology consulting and delivers transformative enterprise solutions for retail. With the focus on next-generation retail management, predictive modeling, AI and blockchain we fundamentally change the way customers think about buying goods and services, providing solutions for the seamless shopping experience.

If you would like to know more about the value of digital transformation for retail, contact us by filling out the form below.