“These are the unique advantages that our solution has — a completely integrated yet different solution,” he says. The solution was rolled out first to the store in New Delhi in August and subsequently to the other two stores.
“The challenges we faced were primarily around prioritising requirements, but we managed it by working in close partnership with other business stakeholders. While functionality is one part of the solution, I strongly suggest investing in a good QA team and invest in strong infosec best practices,” says Satyanath.
Empowering business agility
With its unified commerce platform in place, Hippo Stores can react faster to business changes. “For example, if we must add payment options for our customers, it is now easier. In an off-the-shelf solution, it would have been a long process to do so. With our own product, it is just a couple of weeks, and we are done with it,” says Satyanath.
The company can also develop new features quickly. “Credit-based sales, for instance, is something a typical POS won’t have but since we have both B2B and B2C customers, we need to provide for credit-based sales. We also allow payment by cheque, another feature that a POS doesn’t have. Customers can pay by cheque, their inventory will get reserved. The system will automatically check when the payment has been made and ship out goods to the customers. All this is automated. An off-the-shelf solution would have taken huge amount of time to develop these capabilities, but we are building new functionalities across our platforms, and nothing takes more than two weeks,” he says.
Hippo Stores is now pivoting into a new model of business. “We are now taking the franchisee route with the first such store coming up in Ludhiana. As the technology is fully developed by us and under our control, we can quickly make the changes for franchisee in our systems and are ready to go live,” says Satyanath.
The new solution has also elevated CX for the company. “We offer the capability that a customer can put items in the cart while shopping online and then check out in the store through the cashier,” he says.
Hippo Stores was paying a significant amount annually in subscription fees for its off-the shelf POS solution it was using in the store, which would have gone up with the addition of new licenses with each new store. “The fact that we saved some money in subscription is the icing on the cake,” he says.
