As seen on Essential Retail.
Mulberry has deployed a mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) at its new Regent Street flagship store which integrates store stock availability, eCommerce and payments in a single device.
The luxury retailer decided to remove the physical till points when launching a new concept at its new London store. Instead of a fixed till, store associates using smart devices are able to complete payments while the products are whisked away for packaging before being returned to the customer.
The luxury retailer chose Apple iPad and iPhone devices using Tulip’s assisted selling application and Adyen for payments. The devices can also be used to upsell and order products currently unavailable in store.
“One of the most important things is getting a seamless experience presenting products to the customer on a customer-facing application,” said Mulberry’s group IT director, Richard Cunningham, who explains how store stock, eCommerce and payments were previously three separate systems and the retailer had to spend the last couple of years integrating systems in order to be ready for the new mPOS solution.
“Now we have flexibility by not having a fixed till point,” he said. “And in terms of the customer journey it makes it so much smoother as there’s no need to take someone over to a fixed point in a store.”
Now Mulberry has completed work on its back-end systems it is ready to roll out the technology to the rest of the store portfolio alongside store refit plan which will impact its 42 standalone stores across the globe – 21 of which are in the UK.
“We’re a small, dynamic team at Mulberry and we have good collaboration within IT, digital and retail,” said Cunningham.
“With both Tulip and Adyen, we’ve selected them on the basis that they are able to respond quickly and offer very cutting edge technology, but they also have enterprise-strength solutions. What we haven’t done is go to very small development houses and develop from scratch, we’ve partnered with enterprise partners of Apple, who are very strong companies with a good backing.”
