October 2020

For version numbers, please see the matrix at the bottom of the page.

Smart Substitutions 

Smart Substitutions is an exciting new feature and workflow, that is powered by cutting edge partner integration technology, that aims to take the guess work out of selecting the best substitution items for your customers. Using our partner technology, ShopperKit's Smart Substitution can find the best substitute for any product. Substitutes are sorted by similarity, include equivalent quantities, and personalized to the individual customer. When your shopper needs to make a sub, they will select the sub option from the exception menu. With Smart Subs enabled now, instead of being prompted to scan the sub items barcode, your shopper will be presented with a list of the top 3 Substitution choices for that item. From here the shopper may select any item in the list to see more information on that item, scan one of the items to confirm the sub, or scan any other item that may wish to use instead.

Smart Substitutions does require a separate license and setup with our technology partner to fully enable. Please contact us for more information on how to enable Smart Subs for your organization.

Smart Substitutions is available in ShopperKit Mobile only.

Please see the our feature overview for more information.

Consolidated Sub Approvals

While many of you have been using our SMS communications platform to great ends for the purposes of negotiating substitution approvals with your customers, manually managing the communication process can certainly become a labor intensive effort. To that end, ShopperKit is please to announce the release of our new Consolidated Sub Approvals feature. With this feature enabled, you will be able easily communicate and manage all substitution approvals for an order in a single automated user experience. With the feature enabled, when you have completed picking the order and selecting all the substitution items, ShopperKit will send to the customer a single text message with an order specific URL. This URL will bring the customer to a new single page mobile web application that will allow your customer to visually see all of the items that were substituted on their order. Using the web page, customers will indicate which products they wish to accept or reject by tapping through the application and they will also always have the opportunity to add an additional free-form message should they like to request something different. For items that were rejected by the customer, ShopperKit will create unpick exceptions to walk the shopper through the process of removing those items from the order. Rejected items will automatically be excluded from being sent to POS, though they will need to be removed from the order prior to carryout. Any additional notes provided by the customer through the approval process will appear as a new text message in the orders message chat.

By default, the Approval web application is hosted within the ShopperKit domain. Contact us if you would like to discuss embedding the web app into your existing mobile web properties.

Auto Assignment Picking

ShopperKit Auto Assignment Picking is a new rule based picking mode that allows ShopperKit to automatically assign order picking work to your shoppers based on pre-defined store level rules. Using these rules you are able to tell ShopperKit exactly how to prioritize pending picking work as well as define constraints and limits to how much work a shopper can actually take on at any given time. Auto Assignment picking has advanced concurrency logic to prevent users from being assigned the same batch of picking work and is designed to be used either in whole order picking or zone picking. Since Auto Assigned picking assumes that your picking work is limited to the number of containers that can fit on a piece of equipment, labels are batch printed at the beginning of each new pick run by default, even if the pre-print option is disabled. You may still of course print labels on demand in this mode, but there is an assumed cart setup step with this mode of picking.

Please check out the Auto Assignment overview for more information.

Bulk Collect Picking

Bulk Collect Picking is yet another new picking mode that we are introducing with this release. Unlike all of our current picking modes that utilize a Pick-to-pack picking order centric paradigm, bulk collect picking is different. Rather than picking items for specific orders and placing those items into containers as you travel the store, bulk collect picking is focused on gathering in bulk all of the items that are required to satisfy the orders within a given set of timeslots. Once all the items have been gathered in a cart, the cart is then delivered to a designated packing area where all of the items are then removed from the cart and packed into the order appropriate containers. Bulk Collect picking allows you to operationally divide up picking and packing work as once a cart has been filled by a picker, it may be parked in the designated packing area, where another user can then take over the packing functions. Once orders are packed complete, they are then staged using the same familiar staging process that you are already used to. Bulk Collect picking is ideally suited for center aisle and zone picking where you often will see a considerable overlap of items multiple orders. Due to the nature of how items are gathered in bulk collect picking, exceptions like substitutions and out of stocks are deferred to the packing process as those operations must be completed within the context of an order. Bulk Collect picking also does not support picking of prepared items.

Bulk Collect picking is available in ShopperKit Mobile only.

Please check out the Bulk Collect Picking overview for more information.