A shopper walks into a store carrying a computer. The sales associate stands beside a rack of clothes, perhaps a little less well informed. The shopper can check a price, read a review or look for another size online. The associate may have to disappear into the back room. It is a peculiar arrangement: the person expected to help has the slower route to an answer.
- Starmount connected store selling to product, customer and inventory data.
- Perry Ellis tested mobile checkout before expanding its deployment.
- Engage, Connect and Enact linked selling, information and operations.
- Infor acquired the business in August 2016 for its retail software portfolio.
The customer had the better computer
Starmount built around that awkward imbalance. Its mobile selling assistant, Engage, put transaction capabilities into associates’ hands. They could help a customer and complete the purchase without abandoning the conversation for a fixed register. The company’s proposition was particularly useful to chains whose online shops and physical stores depended on different systems.
The expertise came from inside retail technology. Joe Halloum and Michael Mann founded Starmount in 2006 after leaving 360Commerce following its acquisition by Oracle. Based in Austin, the business developed store software and supplied implementation services. Its eventual customers included Abercrombie & Fitch, Burlington Coat Factory, Perry Ellis and Urban Outfitters. This was enterprise software wearing a shop-floor uniform.
Seventeen stores, then a holiday test
Perry Ellis supplied a useful test. Before Black Friday in 2012, it put iPads running Connect and Engage into 17 top-selling locations. Early coverage described a plan to extend mobile point-of-sale across its 45 U.S. locations by the end of the following quarter. The starting task was wonderfully plain: help people buy clothes while the store was busy.
By the 2013 holiday season, the deployment covered approximately 60 stores. The retailer used it to shorten checkout queues, serve customers around the floor and finish transactions on mobile devices. In an April 2014 announcement, Perry Ellis reported average mobile transaction amounts 14% higher than those at traditional registers during that holiday period.
The distinction matters. Customers using mobile checkout may have differed from those using a register; so may the associates serving them. A larger basket does not establish that the device caused the increase. Still, the operational evidence was interesting: at the top-performing stores, mobile devices handled up to 16.4% of transactions. The tools were being used during a demanding season.
The sequence offers something worth copying. Begin with a task employees already understand, test it where pressure exposes friction, and measure adoption alongside commercial results. Perry Ellis then planned more product information and loyalty capabilities. There was room to expand the job after proving that associates would actually pick up the device.
The tablet needed plumbing
By 2015, public descriptions of Starmount’s Customer Engagement Suite named three integrated applications. Engage supported personalized selling. Connect brought customer, product and inventory information from enterprise systems and the web into the store. Enact covered daily operations, including employee management, security and store configuration. The shiny screen depended on a rather less photogenic movement of data.
Payments added their own requirements. In January 2014, Starmount announced partnerships with Ingenico and Servebase for end-to-end EMV payments, supporting its ambitions in the UK and Europe. Mobile selling needed compatible devices and processing as well as useful software. A payment that works at a desk must also work beside a display of shirts.
The business sold software and implementation expertise to retailers, with a cloud offering reported by January 2016. Its distinction lay in combining store transactions with enterprise information and operations. For a chain considering alternatives such as Oracle Retail or JDA, the question was how effectively those pieces would fit its existing estate.
A brand should remember you
Zumiez made the information problem explicit. After a successful 2015 pilot, it planned a wider U.S. and Canada deployment in 2016. Its existing setup made customer information difficult to share between stores. An associate at one branch could not simply recover what had happened at another.
“From a customer perspective, each store acted in isolation.”Rory Hudson · Zumiez VP of IT · 2016
The new tools brought loyalty information into the selling experience and supported options such as ordering an item unavailable locally. The broader lesson is straightforward: customers remember a brand, while software may remember only a branch. Connecting those memories makes the associate’s job more useful.
International retail made the problem more intricate. A 2013 Unicomer project covered hundreds of locations across Central America, the Caribbean, Ecuador and the United States. Multiple brands, languages and currencies belonged in the same conversation about mobile selling. Starmount’s market was the complicated chain, with its complicated machinery.
The shop floor was worth buying
In December 2013, Starmount raised a reported $13 million from Kayne Partners. In August 2016, Infor acquired it to accelerate CloudSuite Retail. Infor had been assembling capabilities in supply-chain networks and demand management; Starmount supplied store systems. The acquisition announcement reported Starmount’s 2015 year-over-year growth at 41%.
Recorded purchase price, net of acquired cash, including contingent consideration.
A later SEC filing recorded the purchase at $62.1 million, including $9.7 million of contingent consideration. The accounting also included deferred consideration representing a $25 million anniversary payment. This figure describes the acquisition, rather than what a retailer paid to install the software.
The useful lesson survives the transaction. Give associates access to information where decisions happen; prove a manageable use case before adding more. The approach depends on reliable inventory, workable integrations and employees who can use the tools while serving people. If those conditions fail, a tablet merely carries the store’s old confusion to a more convenient location.