Bringing tech to the largest and under-served retail vertical.
Wyndo is a mobile application that enables consumers to know what local inventory is currently around them.
Although eCommerce has rocked the retail world and has received most of the retail investment focus in the last 20 years, the size of the eCommerce market is still overshadowed by Brick & Mortar. Small businesses form the backbone of US economy, and many of these small business ownersare worried about Amazon and the continued investment in eCommerce.
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Wyndo is designed to integrate with all POS systems, but each integration requires development work, so naturally we have to prioritize. Currently, our Square and Clover POS integrations are complete and in testing.
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I can appreciate you have spent a lot of time on your website, and you can of course still have your website and connect with Wyndo at the same time. The purpose of Wyndo is to make it easier for local consumers to shop local. Bringing all inventories together will make it much, much easier for local consumers to find what they are looking for, and to be made aware of new local inventory they wouldn’t otherwise know of.
Google is great. But its business model is different from ours. Google is an advertising and marketing company, but it is not designed to be neutral, nor to help the retailer move its inventory, nor to bring more long-term repeat consumers into your physical business premises.
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Dynamic pricing is a class of algorithm used commonly in ecommerce to change the price of a good, service, or event to keep it moving while maximizing profits.
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The accuracy of the inventory isn’t 100% across all of brick-and-mortar retailer. Some inventories are going to be more accurate than others. In order to moderate consumer expectations, Wyndo uses a reliability score to indicate the likelihood the item is currently available in the store location.
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Ideally everything local. Consider if we only had high-end goods. Then that would mean the consumer would have to constantly guess what is on the platform, and what isn’t. Our platform offers a reliable way of finding what is currently available in their area.
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Our number one question from retailers, and our answer is we want it out as soon as possible, but we want the product to be instantly useful. This is why we want to study retailer point of sale practices and data to maximize the positive impact of the tools upon launch. Our goal is “light up” the Wyndo tech for local consumers in the next 6-8 months (Sept/Nov 2025). But this directly depends on the cooperation of you and a critical mass of market area retailers.
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It’s how Wyndo works! Most retailers use a point-of-sale system as something customers can swipe their card and record the transaction, but the information contained in POS systems offer so much more potential! We are taking the testbed market approach and studying retailer’s point of sale practices so we can continue to develop tools using robust data and smart systems to add value to your business. The only way to do this is to use real data.
Brick and Mortar Reigns Supreme
Your partner and advocate.
Wyndo provides the same technological advantages of eCommerce without the shortfalls.
The Wyndo retailer solution provides the same features that benefit large eCommerce giants. The goal is to equip the local Brick & Mortar retailer with all the tools they need in order to provide local visibility of their inventory, drive increased foot traffic to their store, and grow top line revenue.
About Our Mission
Overview of Wyndo technology for Brick-and-Mortar Retailers
The mission of Wyndo is to make local consumers aware of what local retailers currently have in store, and to keep moving inventory in a way that maximizes retailer profits.
To accomplish this, the Wyndo application connects exclusively with brick-and-mortar retailers’ existing POS systems, not just so we know what is out there, but so we can use similar analytics that are so ubiquitous in ecommerce, such as recommendation systems and price optimization (if desired by retailer), and much more. You are invited to discuss Wyndo’s tech by utilizing our contact form here.
At least initially, the goal of this platform is to inform local consumers of where they can find items they are searching for, and to discover items they aren’t aware of, thereby increasing foot traffic in stores!
Concept Origin - The Founder’s Story
When my son was younger, he and I would take walks around our neighborhood. During these walks my son would stop at all the pinwheels, and of course that pretty soon turned into “we needed a pinwheel!”, for our yard here in Los Angeles. We love our yard and wanted to pick out a really cool wind-spinner together. I called around to many gardening stores asking for them to describe what they have, went to a few hardware websites, but came up short, found the experience very frustrating, never got the spinner, and figured there had to be a solution to this problem with today’s technology.
I realized the current system of expecting every retailer to create, manage, and update its own website, and then hope that Google would properly index and present relevant results to the consumer is insufficient. Google will always prioritize its highest paying advertisers and this means big box and ecommerce will win out over the local retailer. But I soon came to understand the element of hope in this system: most retailers use some kind of a POS (Point of Sale) system to maintain their inventory, and if these systems could feed all their inventories into one place in real-time, we could integrate ubiquitous features like search bars, browsing, and recommender systems that are so common across other big data platforms (ecommerce, YouTube, Facebook, etc.).
Later, I was at a Best Buy and I saw someone looking at their phone obviously trying to find a better deal for the device online. I realized many ecommerce platforms don’t need to have “50% off select items”. Amazon prices items in a way that keeps inventory moving, while maximizing their profits by properly gauging consumer demand for the inventory. . Therefore, we are going to offer this to our retailer partners. This type of algorithm that changes prices in a way that maximizes retailer profits is called Dynamic Pricing and will be an opt-in system.
The more I thought about the platform, the more I realized this platform needed as many retailers as possible, and therefore needs the flexibility to accommodate many different kinds of products, business practices, and business models. I was speaking with a bakery shop owner, and he told me he doesn’t update his POS system with his current inventory of items. Thus, were we to integrate with this retailer we and displayed their inventory, we could provide consumers with inaccurate information. Do we exclude bakeries? Do we only have those retailers that have really accurate inventories? Neither of those options work, because it means Wyndo would be another platform that has unknown niche products, as opposed to making it the one-stop-shop to finding what you are looking for locally. So, the answer is we need a Reliability Score which indicates the likelihood the item is currently in the store based on historical data as well as other features.
How does Wyndo earn revenue?
Wyndo doesn’t give any particular retailer preferential treatment over another, as it makes the Wyndo platform less useful, so no ads. We can’t charge retailers a monthly fee because likely some retailers will benefit more from Wyndo than others, and Wyndo is more useful when more inventories are included. Wyndo is not a warehouse dealer-manager nor a fulfillment center, because the brick-and-mortar super power is to enable consumers to experience and evaluate tangible products before purchase. So, the solution we are going with is a Reservation System. The Reservation System does many great things that will benefit both the consumer and retailer, but what it also does is credits Wyndo with the purchase if the customer follows through with purchase and Wyndo will in turn earn a percentage of the in-store basket transaction (we are thinking 0.5%-2%). In addition, any use of Dynamic Pricing and other opt-in features will also classify as a “Wyndo-assisted” purchase and will prompt that transaction fee.
Summary of Wyndo Goals
Wyndo is most effective when it:
Ø Has maximum participation in a given market
Ø Remains completely neutral when recommending inventory to consumers
Ø Promotes a diverse retail ecosystem in an area
Ø Successfully increases retailer profits
Current state of Wyndo Adoption in the Retail Ecosystem
Currently, Wyndo is in development and launching local market outreach with independent and corporate-owned retailers in two test-bed markets. We are seeking more retailer data to better develop our systems to be meet your needs.