Swift Shopper
Helping retailers bring modern shopping experience through faster checkouts and customer analytics
Introduction
While e-commerce is the fastest growing segment in retail, brick and mortar sales still are 8 times more than online sales. Swift shopper is solving the multi-billion dollar problem of faster checkout times, customer loyalty programs, and deeper analytics into buyer behavior. With deeper partnerships with retailers and top POS providers, Swift Shopper is targeting a sizable market of over 12,000 retail stores in the US alone.
Bringing future of retail shopping to brick and mortar
Swift Shopper wants to help bring the future of offline shopping experiences to brick and mortar retailers. Having raised over $10 million in funding, they are chasing the ultimate goal of reduce checkout times for customers - ultimately improving customer experience.
Their platform helps retailers improve shoppers’ experience by providing an easy-to-use mobile app that provides a personalized shopping solution. With Swift Shopper’s mobile shopping solution, shoppers can cut checkout times by 80%.
Integrating with Swift Shopper PMO
Swift Shopper reached out to see how we can help extend their tech capacity as they liked our dedicated teams offering and saw it as an ideal fit for them.
Our team worked with Swift Shopper’s CTO and PMO to onboard 11 engineers. The first two weeks were spent adopting Agile processes, code review, and refactoring best practices. Sprint planning, daily standups, weekly reviews, and monthly retrospectives helped integrate our team. Regular team visits also helped engineers understand Swift Shoppers vision and culture better.
Easily accommodating various branding guidelines
With the introduction of Amazon Go, the future of brick and mortar retail is being redefined. Swift Shopper is bringing this future of retail to small to medium sized stores with its cost effective solution and a large network of partners.
Swift Shopper allows retailers and POS vendors to create their own tailored white label solution within hours. Without much upfront investment, retailers get access to tech that offers cashierless checkout experiences, deeper insights into shopper/customer habits, creates loyalty programs, offers tailored deals, and offers personalized shopping experiences.
Mobile solution seamlessly merges offline and online shopping
A system architecture designed to be scalable and flexible
The APIs were designed for quick consumption and easy integration.
Behind an easy to use mobile app there is a powerful tech platform driving it all. Integrating different retailers and POS vendors requires a system architecture that is flexible and quick to modify. From the beginning, the system was designed for retailers to easily connect their store’s inventory, POS, and sync their data.
Features like frictionless checkout where users scan barcode, add items to cart, and checkout without waiting in line requires searching through millions of products and check with retailers data. All this should happen in split second. Now, consider that thousands of users are doing this at the same time in hundreds of different stores. The true multi-tenant SaaS design means customers can be up and running in weeks.
When designing systems like this we have to make sure the platform is open enough to easily connect and integrate with other systems of retailers. We broke away from monolithic architecture to a system design that breaks platform into smaller decoupled services. The APIs were designed for quick consumption and easy integration.
Breaking traditional architecture into small micro-services which are independent from each other
We developed a database architecture to enable a cloud-based data warehousing and ETL for scalable syncing between Swift Shopper and retailers’ data. We batched data using complex, multi-stage extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs.
Integrations to help retailers provide tailored shopping experience
For retailers, the ability to provide tailored shopping experience with their branding and their workflows is the most valuable. Thus, system had to be flexible scalable enough to adopt new feature needs from different retailers.
Retailers integrate their existing POS system and data in simple steps from the web application. They can also set their brand guidelines from there to customize mobile solution according to their branding style. Front-end architecture of all mobile and web apps were designed to provide performance and easy customization from backend itself.
Retailers can also integrate Swift Shopper SDK to their existing mobile apps to utilize all or some of the features of Swift Shopper platform. The mobile SDK also works nicely with POS when checking out allowing retailers to offer frictionless checkout experience within any kind of app.
Cloud delivery to speed up the time-to-market
After evaluating a variety of options, Swift Shopper team chose to base their application on AWS. As an AWS Advanced Partner, we designed the new system around the share-nothing distributed architecture to improve load balancing at the web and application tiers.
The system is designed so that each layer provides scalability and high availability, and all computing-intensive functions and operational data are served through multiple nodes of the distributed in-memory operational database rather than having to query the back-office system.
A flexible, cloud-based architecture has allowed Swift Shopper to plug in new services and technologies quickly. Combined with a continuous delivery approach, this significantly improves Swift Shopper’s speed to market. They now have a shopping management solution which allows Swift Shopper to offer extensive order processing capability. New features can be added to their mobile app in days or weeks instead of months or years.
While mobile solution is designed to modernize shopper experiences resulting in better engagement, the biggest benefit retailers get from Swift Shopper platform is in directly increasing revenue per store.
Swift shopper collects millions of data points to provide deeper insights into shopping habits and brand affinities based on time, season, location, demographics, shopping history, and wish list of shoppers.
Swift Shopper analytics enable retailers to gain a new level of market intelligence, only possible for large scale retail operations, serving an industry that continues to wrestle with shorter product cycles and more informed online consumers.
Retailers can create targeted deals and loyalty campaigns around multitudes of above customer behavior points. With high performance, scale-out solution stock currently processes more than 1,000,000 data points on over 200,000 products gathered from hundreds of stores.
