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Consumers walking around stores with their smart phones in hand often send a potentially troublesome signal to many retailers. The shoppers could be shopping an online retailer’s site while using the brick-and-mortar merchant’s store as a showroom.
It’s a phenomenon that Las Vegas-based OrderWithMe Inc. says it can help counter with its new ShopWithMe service. The largest challenge for a small business is the cost of inventory combined with the threat of showrooming, says Jonathan Jenkins, OrderWithMe founder and chief executive.
ShopWithMe uses point-of-sale hardware and software to help smaller merchants track their inventory and provide consumers with access to that inventory while shoppers are still in the store. The service officially launches early next year, Jenkins tells Digital Transactions News in an email.
Pricing has not been established yet, he says, but adds the payment processing will be handled through OrderWithMe.
ShopWithMe has four components. One is the consumer-facing Inventory-as-a-Service tool. This includes a consumer-facing 21.5-inch touchscreen display, a camera, barcode scanner, receipt printer, near-field communication (NFC) reader, Bluetooth low energy beacons, and wireless Internet connectivity. Consumers use this to scan a product to display its inventory levels.
There are apps for iOS and Android devices that act as virtual shopping carts. A shopper can combine items collected in a store with items in their virtual shopping carts to complete a single checkout for all of the items, Jenkins says.
There also is a mobile POS device for employees to use in stores.
The fourth component is ShopWithMe.com, an e-commerce service that merchants can link to. “We are providing our own e-commerce system to our retailers that will run their e-commerce site,” Jenkins says. “This means that we are connecting both their inventory ordering, in-store POS, and online e-commerce site into one easy-to-use and connected solution.”
All the stores that deploy the in-store ShopWithMe solution have the option to link their products to a ShopWithMe storefront, Jenkin says. “Using the ShopWithMe POS, the consumer can buy both physical products in the store and checkout their virtual cart which will be shipped to their house,” he says. “We then route the order to our other retailers, brands, or suppliers to drop ship but the store where the transaction occurred gets credit for the sell.
“Basically, all of our independent retailers across the country become mini-distribution centers which cannot only ship out for themselves but for other retailers in the network,” Jenkins says.
ShopWithMe enables smaller merchants to have access to product inventory that otherwise would not have, Jenkins says. It will help them solve the problem of not having what a consumer wants when she walks into a brick-and-mortar store, he says. OrderWithMe does not address price matching at this time, Jenkins says.
