Provide a Safe Environment for Shoppers and Expand the Role of Your Physical Stores With Openbravo Unified Commerce Hub

Following our previous four blogposts describing the characteristics and benefits of the Openbravo Unified Commerce Hub components, today it’s time to complete the series by focusing on the Store Hub.

A NEW SCENARIO FOR PHYSICAL STORES

COVID-19 has affected retailers in many ways, but physical stores have been clearly hit the most due to the confinement.

The acceleration of digital commerce forced by COVID-19 has led to a very large increase in eCommerce, and a significant number of those new eCommerce buyers will likely continue to buy online in the future. This trend – combined with customers’ fear of contagion as retails reopens – represents a high risk of significant reduction in store visits.

For that reason, it is paramount for retailers to offer the best possible in-store service and to deliver the kind of safe and convenient shopping experience their customers will demand so they are keen to come back again.

Retailers must enable physical stores to act not only as sales points but also as omnichannel hubs that contribute more to filling the increased online demand and offer new services which are a key component of their omnichannel strategy, regardless of whether stores must close again due to new lockdowns.

To achieve this, the Openbravo Unified Commerce Hub includes the Store Hub, a store solution equipped with all the necessary tools to help accelerate the transformation of physical stores and respond more efficiently to this new scenario.

The Store Hub leverages the Openbravo Store, a highly scalable and configurable, cloud-based and mobile-enabled store solution that leverages these three main components:

• Openbravo POS, which offers retailers the most flexible point of sale solution in the market. Enable your stores to deliver safe and convenient customer experiences and prepare them to execute a variety of omnichannel transactions.
• Openbravo Store Operations, which facilitates store managers’ daily tasks with comprehensive store and back-office functionality that lets them maintain full control of what is happening on the store floor.
• Openbravo Commerce Central, which simplifies multi-store management for retail managers, providing unified and real-time visibility into the activity across the entire store network.

SAFE AND CONVENIENT STORE EXPERIENCES

The Store Hub facilitates shopping scenarios that provide more convenience and safety to customers. Scenarios like in-store or curbside pick-up orders, drive-up orders, and the adoption of mobile payments, thanks to Adyen – all of which help enable low-touch customer experiences.

Using mobile POS or self-service terminals can also help provide faster checkout experiences and thus reduce waiting times, which is getting more important in the context of occupancy limitations.

MORE PERSONALIZATION

Integrated CRM, Clienteling and Loyalty Management functionalities at the POS let associates identify and better understand customers in order to provide enhanced and more personalized shopping experiences.

This includes features such as customer look-up, profile creation, access to buying behavior figures like buying frequency, average sales and monetary value, and the possibility of enrolling customers in different loyalty programs. Recommendations on products, services and promotions can also be leveraged to increase upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

Strong transactional support boosts employees’ productivity and reduces training time for new hires. Key features such as manager approvals or guided opening and closing processes improve operational control and cash management.

The solution also includes a flexible returns functionality that allows returns from any store or from the online channel.

 MOBILE IN-STORE INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

To ensure efficient and accurate stock control, the Store Hub includes a rich mobile-enabled inventory management functionality. Inventory tasks such as goods receipts, goods shipments, inventory counts, product movements, and pickings can be easily assigned and executed from mobile devices.

Accurate stock control is vital today with physical stores acting as fulfillment centers and so the solution also includes an intuitive and easy-to-use order preparation functionality for effective omnichannel support. This also facilitates the execution of scenarios like ship-to-store and ship-from-store.

GREATER STORE IT AGILITY AND HIGHER STORE IT COST SAVINGS

Finally, the technical characteristics of the Store Hub bring retailers significant benefits in terms of IT agility and IT cost savings.

As a responsive web solution, the POS component of the Store Hub imposes very limited technical requirements to the POS terminals. This opens the possibility for reusing existing hardware or adopting new low-cost terminals including mobile devices.

And since it avoids the need for local in-store servers and ensures uninterrupted sales in the case of connectivity issues, thanks to Openbravo offline-resistant technology, it dramatically simplifies the overall store IT infrastructure, which ultimately allows for greater hardware savings.

WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE OPENBRAVO UNIFIED COMMERCE HUB?

Download the Openbravo Store brochure to know more about the Store Hub features and benefits for retailers and read previous blogposts presenting the Central Hub, OMS Hub, WMS Hub, and Openbravo Cloud.

Or contact us today to tell us about your needs and let us demonstrate how Openbravo and Adyen can help to achieve your goals with the Openbravo Unified Commerce Hub.