frappka
An important tech tool supporting the management of franchise stores that belong to the largest convenience store chain in Central and Eastern Europe.
Żabka Polska owns the biggest Polish and Central and Eastern European convenience store network operating under Żabka and Freshmarket brands. During its long presence on the Polish market, the company became a leader in its category and currently runs over 5600 stores present in 70% of urban and rural communities in Poland. Żabka chain abides by modern retail standards that focus on convenient shopping.
The aim was to create an intuitive app that would meet the needs of the franchisees and make it easier to manage Żabka stores.
Based on an existing prototype of the application, we started the project with a workshop. The Client decided to use Google's Design Sprint methodology, which helped us learn about business challenges and needs, come up with solutions and validate our assumptions - all to create a better product in the end.
It was essential that members of departments that specialise in end-user needs, decision-makers and target group representatives all took part in our workshops. This helped us gather valuable details concerning their most pressing issues. Presence of all the above groups made us work more effectively and filter ideas right away.
All these ideas were eventually prioritised by the Client, which made us chose the set of features that would bring the most value to the franchisees — store performance, which included data concerning real-time retail and functionality enabling users to generate detailed reports regarding given stores.
Our workshops turned out to be a prelude to another three-month prototyping phase, which resulted in designing software concept. During the prototyping phase, we have performed a test with target users using a clickable mock-up. The Client expected to test the app in real-life situations. Thus, the tests involved a prototype that resembled the final product as much as possible, just to ensure more credible results.
Software development involved creating mobile apps for both iOS and Android systems, as well as integration and data layers. We develop back-end software in Node.js technology, which performs very well when processing large amounts of data in real-time.
Due to the enormous amount of events occurring every day in over 5500 stores, the data stream we received was massive — now we handle 70 million receipts every month. Our system processes and aggregates the data to later depict it in the app.
Store owners can access sales info presented by time periods (real-time, hour, day or month), products, categories or product accessibility in a store.
Our cooperation with Żabka Polska resulted in creating an app aiding franchisees in-store management. It was designed to be intuitive and convenient, presenting data in a lucid and transparent way, and allowing quick and easy analysis.
Thanks to the frappka app store owners gained insight and control over their stores, anywhere and anytime. Main functionalities:
MVP of frappka app is the beginning of Żabka's strategy aiming to design IT tools supporting sales.
Our work was awarded - the frappka app made for our client Żabka Polska won two prestigious prizes at Mobile Trends Awards:
We're grateful for the trust, and we're still developing the app to meet the needs of all Żabka's stakeholders.
