thumbzup’s first omnichannel merchant is now live in Cape Town, and by all accounts, it is a huge success. The business is Yuppiechef, and you may know them from their pioneering e-commerce business. Their latest innovation is to open a physical store. “How is that innovation?” you may ask. The key here is that they have decided to offer an omnichannel experience to better serve their customers. And better serve them they do indeed!
Omnichannel refers to a business strategy in which there is a seamless customer experience across all channels and touch points with a retail organisation. The customer may be shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone, in a physical store and the experience should be seamless. The customer sees only one business irrespective of the channel shopped, or the nature of the engagement experience.
Businesses come at omnichannel from two perspectives. Traditionally, they are an offline bricks-and-mortar store that moves into the online space, such as Walmart in the US increasing its online capability, or Woolworths online store in South Africa. Sometimes they are online businesses that move into the bricks-and-mortar space, the most famous one being Amazon which is opening stores in the USA and recently bought food store Whole Foods. Irrespective of how they arrive at omnichannel, the business consolidates their customer experience across all the engagement channels.
In South Africa, Yuppiechef has been a leading online retailer of kitchen and homeware products for more than a decade. It was founded in 2006 in Cape Town, and is considered one of the pioneers of e-commerce in South Africa. Their goal is to offer you the best kitchen and home products—and to be the very best at doing it. They have independently been awarded the accolade of best eCommerce store in South Africa from 2010 – 2015.
In 2017 Yuppiechef opened their first bricks-and-mortar retail store in Cape Town, and they chose the thumbzup Payment Blade as their method of card acceptance. It made sense because this enabled them to leverage their existing assets, namely their e-commerce website, without having to develop or purchase a specialised point-of-sale system for their physical store. They were able to do this because of the e-commerce API provided for the Payment Blade.
The e-commerce API provides a container that allows an e-commerce site to run as-is on the Payment Blade and provides direct access to both the hardware and payment APIs of the blade. This means that by including a relatively simple Javascript API in their e-commerce site, Yuppiechef are able to use their existing e-commerce capability, but instead of an online payment (where the card is not present in a store), they are able to accept the customer’s payment with the card in the store.
This provides just about the simplest approach to building omnichannel capability that is available today. Aside from saving money on the point-of-sale software and back-end integration, the Payment Blade fits into their stragegy for a seamless customer experience.
thumbzup is able to offer this capability to larger retailers because of our integration with Ecentric Payment Systems and the fact that we can route transactions though the Ecentric fabric in order to support multiple acquiring banks.
The first Yuppiechef store is located at the Willowbridge Centre in the northern suburbs of Cape Town, at Shop 19, Willowbridge, 39 Carl Cronje Drive, Tygervalley.
Visit the YUPPIECHEF website – https://www.yuppiechef.com
