​[00:00:00] Hi everybody, welcome to this episode of Commerce Today, another Omnichannel episode. I'm actually going to chat with you about two different projects that I've worked on over the years in the Omnichannel retail space. Both are for farm and home retailers. One is a company called Rural King, the other one is a company called Family Farm and Home.

They both have a number of stores, over 50, Rural King's a little bit larger, they're closer to 150, and I think Family Farm and Home is pushing towards 100. They're in slightly different geographies in the Midwest, but otherwise pretty similar companies. And wanted to dive in, talk about buy online pickup and store, curbside pickup, ship to store, ship from store, vendor ship to store, all these different fun solutions and even a little bit of React and the headless talk.

I'm gonna dive right in. Worked with Rural King. They actually were one of the first very large Omnichannel retail projects [00:01:00] that I worked on about 10 years ago. We got an interesting start with them. We actually started on their purely digital side. They were selling firearms online and they needed help ensuring they were, compliant with the ATF regulations around that.

And that's a whole other podcast episode, but real quick, just in case I scared anybody out there selling firearms online isn't as scary as it sounds. Basically in order to sell a firearm online, you are only allowed to release that firearm to a federal firearms licensee that is licensed to sell guns.

So basically, Rural King would ship a gun from their warehouse to another gun store. Like here in Texas, Academy Sports and Outdoors is one of the biggest sellers of firearms, and so lots of those shipments would actually go from Rural King's warehouse in Illinois. down to an Academy store here in Texas.

Then you have to, the buyer would go to that store, would complete all the regular steps, background checks, and other things you would [00:02:00] complete. Just like you'd walk into the store to buy the firearm. And only then would Academy release the firearm to the customer. With that though, did you know that the ATF actually has a database that they update out on an FTP server every night?

of everyone in the United States that legally can sell you a firearm so we would have to pull that list and use that to make sure that only those individuals were the individuals that these guns were being transferred to. So got to start there and then they realized that obviously there was a big opportunity in buy online, pick up in store.

So we built out a buy online, pick up and store solution for them. They actually were using an ERP from Epicor, not P 21, which is probably what you're thinking of. But something much older than P 21 called Epicor Eagle. And Eagle Uses flat files, but not quite flat files. It's a very old system.

And typically the way you interact with it and exchange data with it, there's not really an API. You are transferring these files, [00:03:00] and it's actually the character position, positioning in the files, not delimiters, but literally just is this character in row 1, or 5. That is how it would basically interpret the data you were trying to send to it.

So not the easiest system to integrate with, but we built out an integration so that we could pull store inventory into the website. And that was one of the first really big hurdles on that project is over a hundred stores, over a hundred thousand SKUs per store. Oh, we want to make sure that someone doesn't try to buy something for Buy Online, Pick Up, and Store that just was sold in the store and is sold out now.

We need to update this data at least every 15 minutes. So you can do the math there on the millions of combinations of SKU inventory price updates we were having to do and especially Working on e commerce platforms about 10 years ago, we didn't have some of the solutions that we have today. So that was a fun, challenging project.

We were able to get it to that level of [00:04:00] updating. And that's where we launched with was every 15 minutes. I know now the technology's gotten to where it can be near real time updates. So that was their buy online, pick up and store solution. We launched that. Probably the biggest challenges we had with that beyond those inventory updates was just the getting the stores on board and making sure that everyone was trained up and educated on it.

Obviously deal with over a hundred stores, over a hundred store managers, over a hundred assistant store managers, hundreds and hundreds of store employees. They're going to be using the system. That's where their team, they had some very innovative individuals working for them back then. And They did some interesting things, for instance, around light poles, where there would be red, yellow, green light that would light up over the customer service desk or in different areas around the store.

Green basically meaning, hey, you have online orders to pick. Yellow meaning, you have online orders to pick and they're about to be past due. or you're about to miss your time window in which you're committed to picking those orders. And then red meaning, hey, you have passed two [00:05:00] orders. And we just learned from that and other things we rolled out into the stores, what really helped the stores stay on top of those orders.

Probably the biggest thing that I don't think anyone had planned on or thought about until after I went live was we had a few stores where they had just some amazing rockstar employees. And they figured out different tricks and hacks and approaches to how they were pulling the orders, how they were monitoring for orders that we hadn't thought of, that the Rural King team hadn't thought of, and that the store managers hadn't thought of, and so we started going to the stores, meeting with those people, learning from them, and actually setting up so that they could share their knowledge with all the other stores.

And so often That's the case that I see that there's a lot of institutional knowledge within these stores that's down at the entry level and isn't getting communicated up to store management and especially not, chain wide management. So definitely encourage you if you are an omnichannel retailer.

Find a way to unearth those best practices that your own team is creating and distribute [00:06:00] those and don't write off someone's opinion Because they're just a cashier a lot of those cashiers have a better understanding of how this system works than you probably do So definitely take the time to talk with them learn from them and share their knowledge So that's Rural King Probably the other most interesting thing there was vendorship to store.

So they had multiple warehouses So we did a ship to store solution, where you could place an order online that wouldn't be available for pickup same day, but it would be based on when the trucks that Rural King already had going from their warehouses to their stores, when those were running, and so if there was a product that was in the warehouse, they could drop it onto one of those trucks, basically no additional charge, the truck's already making the trip.

Get it to the store and you can pick it up there. And this was great with really bulky, especially like farm equipment, fencing, things like that. People didn't want to pay, obviously, to ship that from a warehouse or from another store. So they were able to get it on the Royal King trucks.

to the store, and then the customer [00:07:00] could just take their own truck to go pick it up. Then we realized, hey, they have hundreds of special order catalogs, and it was still a very manual process of go talk to the one or two people in the store that even know how to place a special order with that vendor, go through the catalog, fill out a paper form, that sort of thing.

And then the customer experience on the backside of that, where Trying to find out when is it going to arrive? Is it here yet? It's not trackable. Like it just wasn't the best experience. That's where I said, Hey, why don't we take this ship to store model and let's roll it out to the vendors as well. So we took all those special order products.

We got them on the website and we got it to where people could just place an order on the website. It would be routed out to the vendor via EDI or an API. Vendor would then place it on their next regular truck that was going either to the Rural King warehouse or the Rural King store When it arrived in the store, it would then generate the same kind of pickup notification a normal curbside [00:08:00] order would generate And there you go.

And so that actually made it a completely automatic process, an online slash digital process, and it made it trackable, which that was probably the biggest boon to, especially to the stores and the customers, is you're no longer guessing, you're no longer surprised when all of a sudden, we said it's going to be three to six weeks hey, surprise, your order's here in two weeks, but now you have to go borrow somebody's truck to go pick it up.

All that stuff we were able to integrate it to where the moment that vendor said hey this item is on a truck going to the Rural King warehouse or going to the Rural King store. We could expose that information to the customer so they would have the same trackability just like it was being shipped with UPS.

So I had a lot of fun. There's a lot more I could talk about on the Rural King project but for the sake of time I will move on to family farm and home. This is the evolution of our omni channel work in the family farm and home space since both of these stores or chains really target that farm and home space.

And if you've never been to [00:09:00] a Rural King or a family farm and home, definitely encourage you to visit one Rural King's based out of Illinois and Family Farm and Home is based out of Michigan, but they both are spreading throughout the Midwest, for those that haven't been to one of their stores, I liken it to like part Target, like a country Target combined with an Academy combined with a feed store is probably the best way to describe it.

And if you've never been to an Academy Sports and Outdoors, I'm sorry, come to Texas, go to one. They're amazing. But, so that's the mix of these stores. So you can imagine they have all sorts of products, all sorts of sizes of items that they're trying to ship and sell and all that good stuff.

So Family Farm and Home, we actually started working with them this is one of those projects, like I'm sure a lot of you listening have stories like this in your own lives, but we started working together in February 2020 because they thought, hey, people being able to buy online and pick up in store might be important.

Little did they know, so starting in February and had basically said, Hey, this will be a six to 12 [00:10:00] month project. We'll get it done for the holiday season. About March 14th, we get a call saying, can you get this done any faster? We need. Pick, buy online, pick up in store. Actually, not even that. We need curbside pickup like yesterday.

That was a Friday. It was March 13th. I will never forget Friday the 13th in 2020, back in March. And we actually took it to our team and said, Hey guys and gals, how can we rally around this? Like, how can we find a solution? To do what we ended up calling insta bopus, so instant bopus, like the fastest, quickest way to power this.

And one of the reasons they were asking for that, the case that they brought to us was customers that are older that maybe were even immunocompromised that had farms that had actually ranches. They had horses, they had cows and they needed feed. And if they couldn't get this feed, or if they couldn't get this medication for their animals then the animals weren't going to make it.

And but they didn't want to risk their health, [00:11:00] especially the ones that were, again, older and immunocompromised. They didn't want to risk their health. And in some states like Michigan, they weren't allowed to. So they were faced with the situation of these animals are going to starve if we don't have a solution.

And before that, I'd always told my team, nothing to do is life and death, but apparently the pandemic changed some of that. We actually were able within about the space of a week to roll out a buy online pickup and store solution. And the way we did it so fast was we said, okay, what are the most critical?

products. What are the products that people are calling the stores for? What are the products that are, in some cases, pretty much life and death? Let's focus on just enabling those products. And let's do just a very basic experience, but people are so happy to be able to have that curbside experience to pick up those items that they so desperately needed.

So that's where we started. Then of course we did the full build out of buy online, pick up and store. And the fun part of that project is pretty soon after we get it live, the order management system that they had selected was EOLed. It was [00:12:00] shut down. And they were given, I think about a year's notice to, or not even a year to find a new order management solution.

And so that was the piece that was Really the source of truth for inventory was pulling inventory out of, they also used Epicor, so it was pulling inventory out of Epicor Eagle. It was what was routing the orders out to the stores. It was how stores, the store interface, the customer or the customer interface, the employee interface.

It was all of those things and it was going away. And so they evaluated a number of different order management systems and honestly, they were all too big. And this was about the time that we were really, we had gone very deep into progressive web apps and into a little bit into headless. We were starting our really deep dive into headless at Creatuity and we said, hold on.

We can build you an order management system because you're on Adobe Commerce Cloud. You have the e commerce functionality you need. It even provides some of the order management functionality. There's just this tiny piece that it [00:13:00] doesn't do. And we basically proposed a composable solution before anyone was selling composable solutions or calling it that.

Where we built out a React headless Very lightweight order management system that filled those gaps that order management system was going away filled. So we built that out and then that has been working very well ever since. It's given us the flexibility and the ability to respond to the store's feedback and to really tailor the interface to make it super fast and easy to use.

There were a lot of frustrations, like just little frustrations. For instance one frustration with the old order management system was lots of times somebody would buy literally 70 bags of mulch or 50 bags of feed and the tablet interface for the old order management system, you had to tap each time.

to say that you had picked that. So if there were 99 items, you tap 99 times. Once it was a headless system that we were in control of [00:14:00] we were able to just have a button where you could still tap or you could just say, I picked all and not have to tap 99 times. So little solutions like that by taking it out of this SAS based order management system and building it in a composable headless manner.

We're able to solve a lot of frustrations like that. Wasn't very surprising then when a couple of years later they came to us and said, Hey, we love everything you've built for us. We're also struggling with the spring rush that basically in springtime, we get so many people come to our stores.

We don't have enough cash registers, especially when you do pop ups in the parking lot around the garden center. You might've seen like Home Depot do things like this. And we don't have enough cash registers, but we don't, we're spending all this money to run power and ethernet out. into the parking lot to set up cash registers that we're only using for a month out of every year.

There has to be a better solution. So I took that back to the team, did some brainstorming, and came up with a mobile point of sale system. And [00:15:00] again, built this a lot like the order management system. It's react based, it's composable and headless. And so now they have a solution where they have all of the features and functionality of their Adobe Commerce online experience on a tablet that Cashiers, or not even cashiers, any employee can use to check out a customer, to look up order status, to look up rewards They have a rewards program so you can look up the customer's rewards data.

You really, anything you might need to do while interacting with a customer and they were able to deploy those out into these garden center pop ups so that they weren't having to make this huge investment in additional hardware. This is just the hardware that their store employees already were using.

So that was probably The most interesting omni channel project we have worked on yet. I'm sure that some of y'all are gonna have even more interesting ones, but really being able to bring the web experience, the digital experience, into literally the parking lot to help those [00:16:00] customers and to help those store employees be able to serve those customers faster.

That was a really cool project. Hopefully between these two different projects, I've given you some things to think about. If you're an omni channel retailer different ways you can improve the customer experience and the customer journey through this omni channel integration of your website and your store experience.

Definitely the biggest misconception I see is it's expensive and only for the biggest stores. We have worked with a store with three locations. We could deploy these solutions for a store with even one location. There's definitely also some options and tech stacks out there that scale down really well to just a few stores.

There's also these solutions that scale into the hundreds and thousands of stores. It's Really doesn't have to be as big and complex. Especially if you already have a good e commerce platform as we did with family farm at home, you might not even need to buy any other technology. You might already have everything you need.

You just need someone that can put it together in the right way to help you make the most out of it and provide the best omni channel experience. So [00:17:00] that's it for this week's episode of commerce today. If you have any questions or would like to be a guest on an episode, please find me on LinkedIn.

My name is Joshua Warren. You'll find a creativity gold background behind my head. And that's how you'll know it's me and not the 20 other Joshua horns on LinkedIn. Also I do free e commerce problem solving sessions. You can click the book an appointment link on my LinkedIn profile, book one of those for free, and we can chat through your omni channel B2B or other e commerce questions.

Thanks. And I hope y'all are having a great day.