NEW YORK, N.Y., July 5, 2024 — The online ordering landscape has seen significant advancements in many industries, yet convenience store (c-store) technology is still in the early stages of its transition. Properly integrating loyalty, backoffice, and inventory management systems into a proprietary ordering solution is crucial for ensuring consumers can seamlessly interact with c-stores both in-store and online.

However, the complexity of c-store technology, which remains largely on-premise with numerous cross-dependencies, poses challenges. Without the right integrations, retailers risk hampering the customer experience or adding substantial manual work to the in-store fulfillment process.

In today's blog, we're pleased to open the hood a bit on what we've built over the past 8 years to properly integrate these complex and disparate tech systems.

Securing On-Premise Interfaces

Legacy on-premise loyalty hosts were not designed for today's Internet-connected world. Many of these systems rely on raw socket connections without HTTP or encryption. To safeguard these connections, it's necessary to encapsulate them with TLS using CA-signed certificates for validation and use long, secure store codes. Firewalls alone are no longer sufficient.

Furthermore, many stores use phone numbers (Alt ID) for customer authentication. While this provides a pleasant customer experience, the practice necessitates a robust approach to prevent API brute force attacks, especially when implementing online banked currency where customer funds are at risk. Two-factor authentication and automatic reCAPTCHAs (Google’s v3 implementation allows you to do so without adding friction) become critical components in such scenarios.

Managing Pricebook and Transaction Logs

Many c-store loyalty protocols demand extensive metadata such as merchandise codes, item groups, UPC/PLUs, scan modifiers, and tax levels. This data needs to be regularly synchronized with backoffice systems to ensure consistency in deals and reporting. Additionally, it's important to register online transactions directly with the backoffice transaction log to avoid reconciliation issues when processing orders that involve loyalty rewards, club pricing, and banked currency.

Backoffice pricebook data can also be very messy. For example, many retailers will use the same UPC to represent items of different package sizes which can complicate automation of digital menus. To address this, it's important to maintain a centralized product catalog with high-resolution images, sanitized product descriptions, and accurate online categorizations. Automation and sanity checkers are also needed to identify errors in menu presentation. Vroom, for example, maintains a database of nearly 1 million items to automate menus for retailers of any size, ensuring accuracy and efficiency in product management.

Abstracting Diverse Specifications

The landscape is further complicated by the fact that some systems use Conexxus protocols while others rely on custom API interfaces. Even within Conexxus-based interfaces that are standardized within the industry, different POS systems have their own “flavors” in how they interpret the nitty gritty of the protocols. For example, some may strip 0-padding and check digits on UPCs while others require a full GTIN. Building robust abstraction layers on top of these protocols is crucial for ensuring scalability and compatibility across vendors as the technology evolves.

Adapting to Delivery-Specific Requirements

Most loyalty and backoffice interfaces were initially designed for in-store transactions, not necessarily for the nuances of online ordering, which include elements like delivery fees, tips, and promo codes. Creating a seamless flow for these components into loyalty and backoffice systems is key for streamlining the consumer experience. Doing so also enables more sophisticated omnichannel marketing campaigns, such as offering fuel customers free deliveries or vice versa.

Broadening Access of Online Loyalty

Implementing robust Electronic Age & Identity Verification (EAIV) systems is necessary for online loyalty programs offering age-restricted items like alcohol and tobacco. Unlike in-store transactions where customers can be carded at the point of sale, online transactions require real-time age verification to ensure legal compliance and prevent underage access. EAIV systems verify customer age and identity during online transactions, reduce fraudulent activities by confirming the legitimacy of the account holder, and enhance customer trust through responsible selling practices.

Integrating online ordering systems with Electronic Benefits Transfer and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (EBT/SNAP) capabilities is also important for inclusivity. This allows customers using government assistance programs to shop online as easily as in-store, providing equal access to essential goods and services, increased loyalty by making online shopping convenient for EBT users, and a streamlined shopping experience, reducing the need for physical store visits, especially beneficial for rural or mobility-impaired customers.

Conclusion

The journey to fully integrate online ordering in the c-store industry is fraught with challenges, from ensuring security in legacy systems to managing diverse protocol implementations and adapting to delivery-specific requirements. However, with the right strategies and robust abstraction layers, it's possible to create a seamless and secure customer experience that bridges the gap between in-store and online transactions. By doing so, c-stores can enhance customer loyalty, streamline operations, and stay competitive in an increasingly digital world.

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