Sali Market

QR Code & Barcode Scanner for an Industrial Warehouse

Services Provided

Mobile App Development, Mobile App Design

Client Problem

I run a warehouse, and my customers want to buy stuff faster. Currently, they go to cash desk, and ask to add their first item to cart, while spending lots of time clarifying which product they're talking about. And then they repeat it for each product. That's a huge pain for them.
If they could add all products they need in a virtual cart and then immediately check out, it would make the whole process a lot faster. In this way, we could serve way more customers per month, increasing our revenue.
But there is one thing we have to keep in mind. We want our customers to see the prices of all products they add, directly in the app. But if our competitors check the prices in the app, they can immediately adjust their prices, which would remove our competitive advantage. So we want the app to work only from our warehouse, somehow.

Our Solution

Main issue - integration with their existing stock management software. In our customer's country it is quite difficult due to industry standards. Basically, only one programming language is used for such infrastructure, 1C, and it is quite old and doesn't support modern functionality. If we go as is, the users won't be able to add stuff to cart and sync it with the cloud immediately (and that's only one of the issues).

Other challenge - making it work from our client's warehouse only. Activation with a physical chip isn't an option, since it will add friction to the process. App should "know" where it's located, and show the prices only when it is in the right place.

Barcode and QR code scanning, as well as basic operations such as "add to cart" or "create profile", is not an issue. But we still have to make sure those features are seamless.

How we made it work

1. Analysis

We don't work with 1C, so our client agreed to find a suitable 1C team to help us out. We would manage both our development and their integration to make it easier for our client.

But the 1C team wouldn't solve any of 1C built-in issues. So in addition to the main app, we had to add another layer of Back-End to support the operations we needed.

With that in mind, we created a tech docs for 1C team, and kicked off the project.

2. Design & Development

The design for this app was quite simple. We had to make sure the app was suitable for the users of older age, as it is the target audience of our client. We quickly finished the designs, and after a few small changes, continued to the development.

Resource allocation was straightforward, as for any other project we build from scratch. We made the app work only from required location fairly easily, and after that last step was out of question, we quickly finished the app.

3. Testing & Cooperation Challenges

We were ready to submit the app, and our client loved the result. But the team behind 1C wasn't an easy partner. The amount of headache it brought us is quite impressive. But, thanks to our involvement, at least our client didn't have to go through any of it - which is exactly what we wanted at the beginning of the project.

Everything comes to an end though, and we were able to get everything we needed from 1C team to successfully complete the project. Once that was out of the way, we could confirm that the location access works as expected, and published the product.