Crafting the MishiPay experience
There is nothing better than taking a collection of systems that were never designed to play nicely together and turning them into something magical.
If aliens arrived from outer space, you’d be hard pressed to explain brick and mortar shopping to them. Walk around an indoor space where you get to browse, experience and enjoy the things you might want to buy, then voluntarily corral yourself into a specially reserved containment zone where, eventually, someone adds up the price of everything and hands you a paper receipt.
Of course there have been some notable tweaks to this journey of late — in some stores you can now get to do some of the adding up yourself — but the principle remains broadly the same. And therein lies the challenge for our developers. On the face of it, the MishiPay proposition is simple enough: let customers scan products in a store, pay for them, and then leave without having to queue. The reality is that many of the back office systems that power most stores are simply not built that way.
Point of sale systems — including the physical tills and the checkouts that you use every day — happen to be one of those essential things that have always just been there. Like petrol pumps and toilet stops — they are the unproductive interludes that punctuate an otherwise enjoyable journey. As a result they tend to be little more than functional, utilitarian — built to meet purely fiscal needs of the store, only to be operated by trained personnel.
The humble till was never designed to be interactive, clever or fun. Placed where they are, right at the end of the journey, they are the retail equivalent of walking out of the cinema after that great movie and straight into a dimly lit car park in the pouring rain.
It’s why our developers are such great problem solvers. They know that the glossy images and sharply worded descriptions you enjoy on a website are rarely straightforward to replicate in store. Few till receipts can muster more than around 20 ASCII characters. Even though sophisticated in-store promotions, customer loyalty schemes and modern methods of payment may have forced retailers to become better connected, most still operate their physical and online presences as completely separate businesses and thus, separate infrastructures.
When we kick off a project, the initial meetings are often attended by multiple suppliers, representing a range of different tech stacks and capabilities. If you’re hoping to exercise your YAML or Protocol Buffers muscles — then brace yourself, the lowest common denominator is likely to be a humble CSV file — albeit with four million rows. APIs may not be in place for at least one system, and those APIs that do exist may not be mature, feature complete or even accessible over the Internet!
Even something as simple as scanning a product can be tricky. There may be no single point of reference that links the online inventory with the items in the physical stores — there’s even a chance that the two stores don’t even sell the same products.
That creates a challenge for our developers. We’re not just looking to build a minimum viable product, but craft an amazing experience for our users. We call that the MishiPay experience, and it’s coming to a store near you…
