Businesses all over the world who never had to set up curbside pickup or online ordering were suddenly forced into the task during a historic quarantine effort.
Presented with management who were used to greeting friendly faces on a daily basis and a staff who kept inventory on paper, here was my approach:
The Context: “Welcome Others, Stay Out”
The Symptom
A multi-location pharmacy uses their website solely for information and posting the weekly circular to give residents a good deal. Now it needs to direct customers to products and fulfill orders.
The History
Pharmacy opened in 1952, survived through decades of changes in landscape and policy, vows to stay relevant in 2020.
The Business Consequence
Without a drastic change, the pharmacy will face significant loss, possible fines.
The Diagnosis: “From Paper to Spreadsheets”
The Discovery
Inventory was clean. It was also on paper. We were looking at thousands of product lines that needed to be translated to a spreadsheet.
We needed to teach the staff how to use Excel.
The Decision
Once uploaded to Excel, we could export as a CSV and import into WooCommerce. Use a simple frontend table view for browsing products, and harden the backend to route shoppers to the right location and staff.
The Intervention: “The Export Business”
Front-end
A Simple WooCommerce Table View with search function for products and categories
eCommerce
The site was built on WordPress, so we used WooCommerce to help organize the inventory, used custom logic to hook into wc_ elements for routing to the right store, notifying of taxes and fees—locations spanned multiple states, and notifying the correct store and the customer of the correct pickup location.
Geospatial Routing
I built logic to detect the user’s proximity to the nearest branch, automatically filtering inventory based on that specific shelf’s stock.
Result
Each location received their orders and fulfilled them with aplomb. Truly amazing how quickly they could get everything formatted so we could deploy this quickly.
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