Vend was a retail Point-of-Sale and inventory management system, enabling merchants to sell products and manage their stock.
The strategy of the Catalog team was to maintain our merchant’s trust in Vend, as their system of record (having the right information to help manage inventory).
We wanted to attract mid-market to enterprise merchants. One of their biggest pain points were inefficiencies and inaccuracies regarding their products via SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) codes (i.e. when ordering, receiving, selling, counting, etc.), and this was due to the limitation and inflexibility of the Vend system.
These same pain points also led existing merchants to frustration due to the myriad of workarounds, which often led to churn and prevented Vend from attracting mid-market merchants.
Some merchants create custom codes based on the type of product, while other merchants use the codes provided by the manufacturer; some products even have multiple codes from the manufacturer.
Custom codes allow merchants to tailor product codes to suit their workflows (e.g. the reporting or organising of products). It also enables merchants to privately label their products so that customers are unable to find where else these products are sold.
Universal codes from manufacturers often come with barcodes that can be scanned. These barcodes not only speed up workflows but also increase accuracy in processes such as receiving inventory, physical sales with customers, and inventory counts. As these codes are universal, several merchants holding the same product will have the same barcode.
Merchants could only record one of these codes in the product.
Optimising for reading the code
If merchants choose the custom, human-recognisable codes without barcodes for scanning, they want to be able to know which product the code is referring to without seeing an image of it (e.g. P-BLU-001 would correspond to a blue pen with a pen nib of 0.1 mm). This is favourable for reporting purposes or ordering from suppliers. However, as there is no barcode to scan, selling or counting stock becomes time-consuming and error-prone.
Optimising for scanning the code