With over 25 years of experience, RedIron knows the retail industry inside and out. Specifically, they work with brick-and-mortar retailers who want to extend their systems and select modern point of sale (POS) solutions.
“ When you work with a [systems integrator] like RedIron, we've got 25 years of retail experience,” says Nathan Losure, Chief Executive Officer at RedIron. “All we do is focus on retail every day… So we know where good experiences lie in the shopping process and where things don't hit the mark.”
Whether their clients have 50 store locations or 20,000, RedIron helps these retailers evaluate and narrow down POS solutions. They start by mapping the full customer experience, from web to store interactions, to identify areas to reduce friction and provide better experiences for customers and associates alike. Recently, that exercise has led them more often to Shopify.
”We don't purposely recommend a platform just off of a partner alone,” says Nathan. “We do it based on research on what we think is going to land the best for that retailer. I feel like Shopify is going to make significant grounds with the capabilities on the platform that I had to become a partner.”
With Shopify constantly checking the boxes, all signs pointed to the platform’s ability to lead in the retail POS space—solidifying RedIron’s decision to become a Shopify partner.
Trade individual features for a unified mindset
When clients come to RedIron, they’re looking for ways to create better experiences for their retail customers. But more often than not, they’re faced with a host of technology challenges that stand in their way.
“Retailers have a lot of challenges right now: the middleware that they choose, the infrastructure they choose, how they make their web services talk to their systems, and how they do their integrations,” says Nathan.
Instead of piecing these technologies together based on individual feature functions, RedIron helps retailers think outside of their accustomed mindsets and instead approach solutions holistically. They suggest a solution that is unified by design to help eliminate tech debt spent on managing multiple separate systems over time.
“There's a lot for them to solve,” says Nathan. “They're solving it to make the customer experience better, to get more revenue in the door. If retailers would step back and stop looking at every feature function and say, 'What can I do to transform my operations, to transform my business to drive revenue?'—they'd be better off.”
That’s where RedIron’s partnership with Shopify comes in. As a leading unified ecommerce and POS solution, Shopify has the necessary features, but also the extensibility to help brands grow.
“When you talk to retailers about Shopify, you explain how you can model the customer journey more effectively and still do commerce. But then you can tie in the ecommerce capabilities that Shopify has, and the inventory, and being able to truly do omnichannel sales. It opens their eyes a little more.”
—Nathan Losure, CEO, RedIron
Harness a platform extensively built for exceptional growth
RedIron is in the business of helping retailers realize they no longer have to be bound to outdated equipment or one-size-fits-all setups for POS in their brick-and mortar-stores. Instead, they migrate clients over to Shopify, giving them complete control over the in-store journey.
“ When you have that platform on the Shopify side that has such a stronghold on ecommerce and the extensibility of their options on the ecommerce platform, it's a natural progression for retailers to go to Shopify to go into POS,” said Nathan. “And I was very excited that Shopify did this because a lot of people start their journey in retail and open up brick and mortar stores after success of doing something on ecommerce.”
For example, one of RedIron’s retailers was looking for a solution that could meet a few criteria: it needed to have a fast time to market, a wealth of feature capabilities, and extensibility options to control their customer experience. In a head-to-head bake-off, Shopify came out the winner with clear marks across those three criteria.
“ Shopify has a big differentiator that is their ability to allow you to extend the platform very easily, and you can do it in a native format. You can build on top of the platform itself, instead of doing what other ecommerce and web and POS systems do. They'll a lot of times embed a third-party application into it. Shopify won the deal on the capability of the platform long term.”
—Nathan Losure, CEO, RedIron
Trade rigid experiences for custom clienteling
The needs of a retailer with 20,000 stores are very different from those with a few dozen. With Shopify, RedIron can help each of them grow in their own way.
“ Shopify allows you to cater to that experience in a completely different way,” says Nathan. “You can start in any facet of the experience. That's a unique value proposition. As [Shopify] matures more and more with key feature functions, which you have north of 3,000 developers actively working on this platform, the feature functions are going to be there.”
With the Shopify Extensions, RedIron has already helped retailers improve their customer experiences by breaking down traditional journeys. For example, one brand had built a rigid, predefined flow that led customers linearly from one experience to the next. On Shopify, RedIron helped them create a new journey where associates already know what products resonate with customers as they walk in. They can suggest recommendations and, in Nathan’s words, “make that journey a little more exciting for that customer.” Powered by Shopify POS, customers can also skip the register and transact right as they work, pulling the journey forward more quickly.
The value of RedIron’s partnership with Shopify stems from being able to extend experiences like this for retailers, now and in the future. With another retailer, they created an innovative journey on Shopify using essentially a magic mirror. While customers try on items, they can interact with the mirror and add the item they’re wearing directly to their cart without having to scan it.
“ Shopify gives a whole host of options to a retailer with their API, with their basket management, with the way you can add panels to the experience to allow a retailer to imagine commerce in a different way and act on it. That's where [Shopify is] adding features and capability sets. It's going to become more evident in the industry to other retailers that may need to get some focus on Shopify as a platform,” says Nathan.
Back your business decisions with truly unified data
Across all the retailers that RedIron has migrated to Shopify, there’s one aspect of the platform that stands out: No matter if they started online and want to expand their commerce capabilities in-store or vice versa, Shopify’s unified data model connects insights across all customer experiences.
”Shopify’s single view of the customer, independent of what channel you start your journey on, is very unique from a data perspective. It allows marketing teams to create campaigns that resonate with certain clientele. It allows them to get to truly know what their customers are and what their buying habits are, what percentage of transactions are done in-store versus online. All that data and the analytics are very powerful, and it's a unique proposition because most major point of sale systems stay in their lane.”
—Nathan Losure, CEO, RedIron
While other commerce platforms require retailers to integrate from one system to another, Shopify cuts out the extra steps. Whether a customer interacts online or in a physical store, their data is unified in one platform, without needing to modify it within extract, transform, load (ETL) processes or synchronize it after decrementing inventory against financial data. “It's already infused and it's really a strong commerce platform,” says Nathan.
Raise the bar on scalability
This is just the beginning for RedIron and Shopify. As Shopify continues to grow its features and capabilities, RedIron predicts that more major retailers will be eager to make the switch.
“[Shopify was] the fastest in the payment processing in the industry. And still with that endorsement, [Shopify] recently redesigned that to make it even more efficient and decrease the transaction time by another 50%,” says Nathan. “Most competitors would say, I hit that benchmark and I'm done… But [Shopify is] always looking at how to better make it scalable for customers and basically make that a palatable, formidable force in the industry. [Shopify is] always raising the bar on that.”
With the strength of the partner ecosystem, the ability to purchase modules from other vendors, and a marketplace to buy enhancements on top of Shopify Extensions, RedIron’s long-term view of what they can achieve with their partnership with Shopify is very optimistic.
“I see Shopify being a major disruptor, and I believe tier one POS retail providers are starting to get nervous because [Shopify] makes such an investment on [their] platform… People are going to take notice because Shopify is going to move up market quickly and very efficiently.”
—Nathan Losure, CEO, RedIron
