Vender of the week: Caribou Baby

Every week we post a quick profile of one of our many interesting customers worldwide.

Who: Caribou Baby

Where: Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY, USA

What: Caribou Baby offers products and classes for pregnancy, birth preparation and parenting, as well as baby supplies and toys, carefully selected to encourage simple and healthy living.

Love your customer: We love babies, and we love Brooklyn, NYC! Caribou Baby, which is owned by husband & wife Greg and Adriane Stare, has a goal of supporting young, city dwelling folk through the challenges of early parenting, in a welcoming environment, with a focus on intuitive parenting and sustainability. Something which resonates dearly with many of us here at Vend. And Greg is an active member to our community and product feedback forums, which we always welcome.

Love your POS: ”We’ve really been thrilled with Vend and are happy to contribute to it’s development.  We moved over from our old POS and have never looked back.” - Greg Stare, Caribou Baby

Love your customers: with Peoplemine for Vend

PeopleMine, an exciting new Vend integration partner, offers “customer analytics software for smart businesses.”

This is very clever stuff. A bit like Google Analytics, but for people, instead of websites. And best of all, you don’t need a PHD in marketing or statistics to understand your data and engage with your customers.

Through a seamless integration with the Vend API, PeopleMine takes all the customer and sales data from your point of sale transactions, and produces smart reports in a user-friendly, intuitive format.

Clever visualisations, and powerful analysis makes understanding your customers simple. You can easily track at-risk customers, or see which groups are performing well, for targeted marketing. Full RFM (Recency, Frequency, Money) analysis, and email campaign tracking.

By integrating Vend point of sale with PeopleMine, your bricks and mortar business will have the sort of retail & customer analytics normally only available to big players like Walmart and Target, at a fraction of the cost.

Sign up for a free trial at www.peoplemine.co.nz, link your Vend account (on the account page) and find out for yourself.

• Read and download a factsheet on PeopleMine
• Read and downloa a factsheet on PeopleMine + Vend

Getting social with friends of Vend

At Vend, we love to hear how our retailers are able to create a gathering place for not only their data, but also their customers.

Last night, Vend welcomed several of our customers, partners and friends to our San Francisco office to further explore how we use social media to connect with our existing and future customers.

In a room full of experience and industry insights, we explored some of the questions and processes related to social media.   You can find the full discussion on twitter under the hashtag #VendSocial.

Catherine Walker, Community Manager at Xero, fielded one of the primary questions we all ask:   With so many choices, how do you determine which platform to use?  Walker explained the need to be where your customers are; the end user drives your presence and choice.

Raising the question of balancing audience needs, Aish Fenton, co-founder of vWork App, shared with us his experience of listening to what information existing customers seek, what attracts new customers and how to maintain a personal side to your message.

Our friends at Taylor Stitch shared how they use multiple platforms to announce new releases of their shirts, monitor customer satisfaction, and gave many of us a first look at Instagram as a method of sharing photos.

Joining us from Shift Communications, Jennifer Usher and Jenna Broughton, discussed with us the importance of employees embracing the social media platforms used by the company and engaging in conversations with customers.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed?  Can’t seem to follow the conversation?  We met talkwheel, and saw how it can bring online interaction and engagement full circle.

Ending our evening with a forward looking question, was Jamie Sutherland, President, US Operations for Xero.   He asked, “What is the next ‘twitter’ or the next big social media platform?”  We ask you the same.   What do you think?   How will we engage with our customers 5 years from now?

Kara

Vender of the week: Quilted Thimble Cottage

Every week we post a quick profile of one of our many interesting customers worldwide.

Who: Quilted Thimble Cottage

Where: Belmont, North Carolina, USA

What: A family-owned and operated quilt shop, Quilted Thimble Cottage have been using Vend point of sale in their bricks and mortar shop since 2011, integrated into their Shopify online store.

Why Vend: An important part of running/owning a quilt shop is to setup in various regional quilt shows as a stall vendor. In the early days Quilted Thimble Cottage relied on carbon-paper receipt books that were then reconciled back in the brick and mortar on Monday mornings. With Vend, they can take their point of sale on the road, and cut out all that unnecessary paperwork!

“A wonderful combination of integration, inventory management, and portability. The best part is the customer support that Vend offers!” - David Thurston, Quilted Thimble Cottage

Meet the team: Keri Henare

Every month we profile a member of the Vend team. This month it’s Keri Henare, who joined Vend in October of 2011, and has well established himself as our cheekiest uber-geek and tech fanboy extraordinaire.

Many of you will know Keri well already, from his highly respected work (and ferocious tweeting). But for those of you who don’t, here he is, in 6 questions or less..

Who are you?

I’m Keri Henare - Web developer extraordinaire

What are you doing here?

I’m part of Vend’s senior development team.  We craft every feature that goes into Vend and are constantly refining the application for a better experience.  In particular, my focus is on the sale screen, which is the most used component of Vend.  I’ll be putting a lot of effort into perfecting the flow of transactions and making everything easier for our users.

Where did you work before ‘turning green’?

Before joining Vend I was co-owner at Pixel Fusion (http://pixelfusion.co.nz), an amazing web development team.  I was sad to leave Pixel Fusion, but Vend was an opportunity that couldn’t be turned down.

Why Vend?

Like many others, I’ve done my time working in retail on terrible archaic point of sale systems.  I love the opportunity to be part of what Vend is doing: Showing the big boys how well POS can be done and turning an entire industry on its head in the process.  Vend has a big future ahead and I’m excited for the journey.

Tell us something curious about yourself.

[ REDACTED FOR PUBLIC SAFETY ]

If Vend was a Sci Fi hero, who would it be?

Neo from The Matrix. He exists to bring freedom to the enslaved, making a world of computers better for humans. He has both online and offline support, and (like us) he’s a fan of the colour green.

Keri
http://kerihenare.com 
@KeriHenare

Vend support moving to Zendesk

We wish to advise our customers that we will shortly be moving all our online support services, currently hosted at http://help.vendhq.com, to Zendesk, the leading hosted support platform. The new support centre will be hosted at

http://support.vendhq.com

Our change of support platform times with the release of a major product update to Vend, so we can begin 2012 not only with a shiny new point-of-sale app, but with an awesome new helpdesk too!

Zendesk comes packed with a host of cool features and integrations to enable us to provide our customers with the highest level of product support and community engagement possible.

“What do I need to do?”

Nothing :)

Our existing product knowledgebase will be available on the new platform, and the current helpdesk will remain live (in a reduced capacity) for a couple of months after switchover. Any outstanding help tickets and customer history on the current platform will still be available and attended to, but after switchover, any new support enquiries, tickets, emails and public forum posts will automatically be directed to Zendesk. 

New year, new Vend

We are very pleased to present our customers a sneak preview of a major product update we will be releasing early next week. The culmination of many months’ hard work by our dev team, as well as feedback and testing from our customers.

Below is a round up of the top features about which we’re most excited.

Please note we anticipate approximately 2 hours service outage during the upgrade, on Sunday 8th January at 01:00 Pacific Time (GMT-7) / 09:00 GMT / 22:00 NZ Time (GMT+13). The Vend sell screen will still function in ‘offline’ mode during this outage.

Composite Products

With composite products you will be able to build virtual ‘menu’ items out of whole, multiple or split products. Selling or order a composite product reduces or increases inventory from the products which make up its parts. 

We’ve designed composite products to be as flexible as possible, to work with the widest range of inventory. Some examples could include

• Case of Wine (composed of 12 unit bottles)
• Glass of Wine (composed of 0.2 unit bottles) 
• Hamburger (composed of 1 burger, 1 bun, 0.2 tomato, 0.1 cheese)
• Bicycle Set (composed of 1 bicycle, 1 bike helmet, 1 lock) 

Learn more

Product History

Every action against a product in Vend will record an event in a searchable product history, or audit trail. If an item is sold, received, voided, or transferred, the product history is updated, with details of the action, date, the user, a link to any sale or orders, and the before and after inventory.

Learn more

Element Integrated Merchant Processing

US based Vend customers can now enjoy full integration with Element credit card processing. You can integrate an existing Element account, or set up and integrate a new account.

We’ve made the setup process as simple as possible. All you need is your account details and a usb card reader. In a few short steps you’ll be up and running.

Staff Sales Targets

Managers will be able to set daily, weekly and monthly sales targets for staff, which can be tracked by the management team. Staff will also be able to see how well they are performing against their targets, visually, in a redesigned staff level dashboard.

Learn more

Shiny New Dashboard & Admin 

The dashboard has been completely redesigned from the ground up. Flash graphs have been replaced with HTML5 graphs. Staff & management can track their sales performance. And reporting has been integrated with the dashboard.

And all other admin pages have undergone an extensive design and user interface upgrade, with particular attention paid to the product pages (both product list, and add/edit product pages) and sales history.

Learn more

We hope you enjoy your new Vend, and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

Thank you and happy new year.

Team Vend 

Merry Christmas from Vend

From all the team at Vend, we’d like to wish our customers, partners and friends a very merry Christmas. 2011 has been a great year. We’ve retailers around the world change the way they do business for the better, grown as a company, and had a little fun along the way.

2012 promises to kick off with a bang, with some exciting new features on the way. So keep an eye on our blog for updates.

Happy holidays to all, we hope Christmas trading this year has been your best ever!

Team Vend

Left to Right: Rowan, Vaughan, Nick, Kyle, Dom, Mat, Keri, JC (absent, Kara, Morgan, Amiria, Mel, Lauren and Steve)

Putting an end to bad point of sale

When we launched www.welovepos.com - a website for sharing point of sale horror stories and celebrating great technology & design - we purchased a clunky, obsolete old cash register called Steve, with one purpose in mind: trashing him.

In fact, we would happily see an end to all the Steves of this world - overpriced, difficult, and dated point of sale systems that just won’t die. So we went to our customers and asked them how we should help Steve meet his maker: by firing squad, smashed to pieces with hammers, or by ‘falling’ off a tall building?

Then as the votes started coming in, we thought, why not all of the above?

But more than just film a few developers with pale skin and bad posture ‘taking it’ to an old cash register with baseball bats, we wanted to tell the story of why we are so determined to put an end to miserable pieces of s**t like Steve, and all his kind, in the first place.

Here is that story. Enjoy. (Watch in full HD glory on YouTube)

(For those of you interested to know what the actual final vote count was from We Love Pos, here it is..)