Digitalization made simple for small shops
This repository contains the idea and different PoCs developed during the Olivetti Cash Register 4.0 Hackathon at Trento
Our idea consists of a system that allows merchants to generate an e-commerce website from her/his new Olivetti Cash Register. Downloading the Olivetti Social Manager from the Olivetti Store, he/she will be able to express the style and the story of his/her shop though a website easily accessible from every device.
Products are automatically imported from the Cash Register using the Olivetti APIs provided from one of the stock applications. When it's time to publish a new offer, the merchant can select the product, insert a message and publish the offer on multi social channel in a single shot: Facebook posts, Instagram photos or push notification for the users that already have opened the webapp on their phone. Moreover, the platform allow the merchant to publish Ads using Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads and similar services.
The e-commerce is a webapp built with React.js. When the merchants installs the app an id for the shop is generated and this is used to identify the configuration of the e-commerce. The configuration is sent to the server and when the browser requests the page it specifies the shop id, to retrieve the common scripts and the shop configuration. This means that all the e-commerce are accessible from a url with the same domain and one id that changes for each shop.
Example: https://social-manager.it/shops/12345
The merchants will be able to replace the generic url with a personalized domain, always from the Social Manager App.
When the merchant publishes a social post using the Social Manager App, a request is sent to the server, which then publishes the post trough the selected channels.
There will be a Facebook App that requires permissions to administer pages and the merchant will be able to give the permission to the app from the Social Manager App. The server can then use the Facebook API to publish the post.
The approach is very similar to Facebook, but using the Instagram Graph API (for business accounts).
When a post about a product gets published, the description will automatically contain a URL that points to the product page of the e-commerce. From there the customer will be able to add the product to his cart.
The information about the users are obtained from the login via Facebook or other social networks.
If the customer selected the option to pick up his/her purchase from the store during the checkout, she/he will need to scan with his phone (running the e-commerce webapp) the QR code that appears on the secondary screen of the Olivetti Cash Register. The QR code identifies the single machine inside the shop. The webapp will then send a request to the server which will notify the Social Manager running in the cash register to show the page with the info about the order. We initially thought about using websockets to connect the cash register with the server, but further discussion is needed to evaluate possible scalability problems.
Social Manager will also offer automatic chat bots, through the Facebook page of the shop. The both will be able to automatically answer questions about the timetable, order status and sales. When the question is too difficult to be answered by the bot, the question will be sent to the server and showed in the Olivetti Cash Register. The merchant will then be able to answer the questions, coming from different channels, from a single app.
We implemented different small parts of the idea, to be able to show the most important features during the presentation.
Implemented components:
- Prototype interface of the app running on the Cash Register. The app is built using Flutter.
- Prototype interface of the e-commerce running on the smartphone of the customer. The app is built using React.js.
- Facebook bot server implemented with Express. The bot uses Microsoft LUIS to extract intents from the user messages.
- Microsoft LUIS training for customers common questions.