Throughout covid lockdowns, the retail store I worked at closed its doors for in-store shopping, relying solely on online click and collect orders. While this allowed us to still continue business, it introduced a bottleneck in our daily procedures. When a customer came to the door, an attendant would be there to take their order number, and relay it to another team member who would retrieve the order from the receiving dock. Often this communication would be announced over store headsets, which would cause a lot of radio clutter and confusion, especially if there were multiple customers awaiting their orders.
"Can I get a click and collect for Smith? Order number 123456."
"Click and collect for Davis. Last digits are 6789."
"Wait, can you repeat the first order?"
"Sorry -- that was Smith, order number 123456."
"Okay, both are on their way."
This was a nightmare. It was inefficient and forced customers to have to wait longer for their orders. It was clear a software solution could improve this procedure drastically.
After a weekend of coding, the store had a functional web-app to run on the store-use iPad and iPods to allow fetching customer orders much faster, without the radio clutter. The front door attendant would input the customer name or order into their client and all other team members in the store could see the incoming valet requests and fulfill them with ease. Additionally, the system was usable by multiple stores without interference.
Bootstrap, Firebase Realtime Database, jQuery.