Results

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• Provides a high-end, modern and reliable order taker for a trade show environment
   

• API integrations with trade website and in-house order and customer management system.
   

• Reduced time and costs in the logistics of setting up and returning from the trade shows.
   

• Demonstrates the client as a market leading supplier by offering a modern technical solution.
   

• Significantly improved the customer ordering experience at the trade shows.
   

• Reduced costs by no longer being dependent on exhibition provided Wi Fi.

 

The Partner

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The partner is a leading wholesaler and retailer of homeware, gifts, toys and games that have been designed for every occasion. They’re an established business having started some many decades ago on the streets of London’s Portobello Road. Their beautiful, fun and quirky products can now be found across the entire globe. They have also been awarded the 2019 Queen’s Award for Enterprise which was given for outstanding continuous growth in overseas sales.

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Background

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The client attends multiple trade shows each year across the UK and in locations throughout Europe.

The trade shows are an important occasion to introduce new clients to their business and meet with existing clients, whereby they can both go on to make an order. The client was using very old “rugged” handheld devices to take orders. These devices had no internet connectivity and very limited synchronization functionality that required “docking” the device to a PC desktop and then performing the synchronization using an application in Windows.

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The device would work in such a way that either an employee or the customer directly would scan the barcodes of items displayed at the booth, and with each barcode scan they would be prompted for the quantity that they would like to order. The limited nature of the application meant that the display on the screen was very basic and the experience, overall, was very clunky.

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There were also some incidences where the device would fail, causing the customer to “lose” their order. This caused significant frustration to both the employee and the customer – and caused a negative impression of the business.

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The partner required a new and modern solution that would not only match the features of the current solution and solve its limitations but provide a far better experience for the customer. In particular, they wanted to provide the ordering experience from a higher resolution tablet device where the photos of their products could be adequately showcase. It was also requested that the customer could also use their own mobile phone to download and use the app themselves.

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Solution

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We proposed to develop an app that would be available to the customer via their Apple Store or Google Play store.
 

The app would allow the user to sign up as a new customer, and allow existing customers to login using the same credentials that they use to login to their account on the Rex London Trade Website.

 

Staff at the trade show would also be able to login using an employee login, this would provide the ability to create orders on behalf of customers. There would also be additional functionality available to the logged in staff member, including performing stock checks.

 

We took advantage of using a development framework that would allow us to share the same code-base between Apple and Google so that only one solution would need maintaining. The application was optimised to work on Apple’s iPad devices, this provided an extremely rich, colourful and beautiful experience for staff and customers when creating an order. It also supported all the different mobile screen resolutions.

 

A limitation of physically exhibiting products at a trade show is that not all products could be exhibited. We handled this shortcoming by ensuring that the full range of products would be displayed on the app, allowing users to browse through the entire product ranges and categories based on the items they could see at the exhibition. This provided an upsell opportunity.

The app would also synchronise with the partner's Business Management System ensuring that the app provided real time stock availability, product images and allowed existing customers to see their existing and past orders.

 

With the new solution there was no longer a need to bring a desktop PC to the trade show. This made it much easier to transport the contents of the booth to the trade show, and then shipping everything back to the office.

 

Although the exhibition organisers Internet as Wi-Fi at the trade shows, this would be a costly investment and would often be unreliable. The new app would work with both the existing Wi-Fi internet but would also work equally well using the phones cellular network, e.g. 4G. At some shows, it was no longer necessary to purchase the trade show Wi-Fi which saved significant costs.

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