Business Objective:

Campus Book Rentals operates in a very fast-paced environment with a ton of competition. Constant innovation is absolutely necessary. We helped them build the following:

• Point of sale software
• Inventory management software
• Reporting dashboards
• KPI charts
• Shopping carts
• Web API's
• Pricing engines
• Physical kiosks for in-store textbook rentals

Challenges:

• Building a mobile point of sale system required a lot of usability testing and usage analytics. We brought in and tested the system with live users to watch their interaction with the mobile device and make adjustments to the user interface.
• Textbook pricing fluctuates dramatically according to supply and demand. The Pricing Engine required real-time inputs from various data sources across the web including Amazon, Ebay, Alibris and more. Retrieving that data, crunching the algorithm and displaying rental prices had to be done instantaneously to keep users engaged and to improve conversion.
• The shopping cart was a work in progress as it had to be constantly optimized for conversion. We were always conducting A/B tests to see what worked best.
• We needed to build embedded software that we could image to different machines and duplicate quickly. It had to be impenetrable by student hackers and incredibly reliable to handle back-to-school rushes.

Solution:

We helped them build a system that was able to scale up and down with massive influxes of seasonal back-to-school traffic. We optimized each page in the sales process which helped the rental website maintain incredible conversion rates of 7-12%. The mobile point of sale was implemented at bookstores for many of the top-tier universities across the country. We also built a stand-alone kiosk from which students could browse for, select and pay for their rentals.