The Solution
Jumpmind passes the test.
So AEO did what most retailers its size would do: it presented its challenges to all of the well-established, big-name POS vendors. They met with multiple candidates, each producing red flags that AEO couldn’t ignore. “Some didn’t scale for enterprise, others didn’t offer the ability for us to control various aspects of the solutions, a few didn’t support international stores and none of them gave us the option as to what public cloud infrastructure we could use to host the solution. All the vendors sent their sales teams, trying to sell us an out-of-the-box solution, rather than listening to what our concerns were and trying to find solutions together,” said Rector.
Then one of their engineering partners reached out to them from the National Retail Federation’s “Big Show” conference in New York and asked them if they had considered Jumpmind. “Who?” asked Rector. The unknown POS vendor began to build credibility and trust from the very first meeting, with Jumpmind’s engagement team including many technical and engineering experts. That trust continued to grow, and today Jumpmind has become a trusted and valued partner to AEO.
Jumpmind, an Ohio-based software company, founded by software engineers, sent their technical SMEs and approached AEO from an engineering, problem-solving perspective. They explained how Jumpmind customers could own their configurations, manage as much of the solution as they wanted, and adapt the solution to meet the immediate and as critical, the future needs of AEO stores. Jumpmind took the time to explain their architecture, the openness of the platform and the flexibility that comes with microservices, and how the platform could compose whatever experience AEO wanted to deliver to its store associates. AEO had the confidence that the mobile solution could scale for a retailer with both the store and device count that they have. Rector reflected how Jumpmind provided them with the confidence that partnering and collaborating with the unknown POS vendor was the right choice for their business today and more importantly, for the future as well.
AEO decided to stand up Jumpmind Commerce, Jumpmind’s mobile POS application, on a single iPad in one Pilot store – communicating with and sitting alongside the store’s existing legacy registers. AEO gradually added more stores, expanding to 20 stores and putting Jumpmind Commerce to the ultimate test: the 2022 holiday shopping season.
“Launching a new POS during the holiday season is certainly a risk,” Rector said. “However, our store associates immediately gravitated to the mobile devices. Store leadership teams attribute the quick adoption to the ease and simplicity of using Jumpmind’s POS, and the fact that we deployed this without formal training and had relatively few issues was a huge win for both AEO’s technical and store teams.”
