Architectural analysis of Retail Omni-channel and integration of Cash IT Point-Of-Sale software with E-commerce platform

Abstract: Omni-channel has become a major player in retail marketing today. It is steadily gaining popularity among retailers because of its capability of providing consistent and seamless customer shopping experience. Omni-channel allows sales to take place via the variety of channels as it implements cross-channel business model. With the emergence of technologies like mobile devices, E-commerce and social media, the way of retailing as we used tohas changed significantly.Customers of today use different variety of channels and devices on their shopping journey. Omni-channel provides retailers the opportunity to engage and build strong retail relationship with customers, offering different retail channels for customer to use. Store pickup is one of the strategies offered by Omni-channel as it presents an unique way of purchasing to customers. However, selling on a single channel is not enough due to the increasing demand in better shopping experience from customers. Such demand has put retailers in a position to rethink and redesign their retail marketing strategies. We believe cooperating online with offline channel is the response to the demand.This work aims to find answers to the study questions regarding retailer requirements and E-commerce platform to be integrated. The obtained analysis results provide answers to the study questions indicating that retailers are looking for strategies to fulfill thier customer requirements as their shopping demand continues to increase. The analysis results further show that WooCommerce as an E-commerce platform is most sutiable for the integration out of the three considered platforms. The integration is part of the implementation phase that demonstrates the proof of concept of Omni-channel strategy. As a proof of concept, a prototyp is developed and implemented. The implementation result provides an integrated system that seamlessly combines online and offline channels in regard of store pickup as part of Omni-channel strategy. However, the results of this work only provide information and demonstrate an initial step towards completed Omni-channel and that alot of work is required in order to reach the full Omni-channel retail.