Overview

A micro market is a custom-designed vending market with a self-checkout kiosk. According to Vending Market Watch, the micro market and vending industry is a $22 billion industry and growing. Cashless payments are the simplest way to make purchases, especially in micro markets.

Prior to acquisition, Yoke Payments was an innovative player in the self-service checkout experience at the point-of-sale (POS) empowering customers to scan, pay and checkout from any mobile device or tablet.

Yoke's technology integrated seamlessly with more than 40 major platforms, enabling faster onboarding through a plug and play setup that simplified operations and reduced costs, creating a profitable and scalable micro-market solution for small to medium business; as well as enterprise customers looking to maximize existing locations.

Blood & Treasure was hired to build a web portal to allow Yoke’s clients to manage their locations and customers, and to obtain detailed insights via analytics.

The brief called for a reliable platform to enable live customers to securely manage their e-commerce operations and included a sophisticated permissions system.

Yoke were already using a third party while label solution to manage operations, but it was a bit clunky and the feeling was that a custom solution tailored to their specific needs would allow greater productivity and offer a better experience to their clients.

After detailed business and technical analysis and wireframing, we organized the scope of work into modules and set up sprints to build out each piece consecutively.

One of the more difficult aspects of the work was the permissions system which allows Yoke clients multiple levels of access to specialized functionality, e.g., managing multiple separate stores under a single brand. This effectively meant that there could be many different versions of the portal depending on a given client’s access level, and their access could be completely customized for each user.

It involved significant testing to ensure any combination of permissions and user type would work perfectly. This was a prime consideration at every stage of development as we implemented new functionality and built each module.

With their new custom solution, Yoke achieved good market positioning to scale in size by delivering a more efficient and reliable offering to their micro-market and vending clients, and were acquired by Cantaloupe, Inc., a digital payments and software services company that provides end-to-end technology solutions for the unattended retail market.

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