Owner’s Locker may look Simple…..
Brian and I heard it again yesterday in a conversation with Alex, our web developer: “You know, this business looks so simple….but your website is one of the more complicated sites I’ve ever worked with.” And I was talking with my old boss from my corporate stiff days who’s one of our investors a couple of days earlier. “John,” he said, “this is a VERY complicated business. I didn’t realize the complexity at first.”
Owner’s Locker does appear to be deceptively simple. We drop off your Locker; you enjoy having your stuff; we pick up your Locker and store it until you come back.
But let me tell you…when you pull back the curtain, you won’t find someone pulling levers as in the Wizard of Oz. It’s all high tech and we realize every day that it is very, very detailed and complicated. So intricate that we have a patent pending on our business process!
And the neat thing is that none of this shows. The whole point is that it SHOULD be easy for our Members. Drop dead easy, in fact. We are supposed to take some of the hassle out of vacations and make them more convenient. So everything our Members see is easy. Our site has to be simple to use and the Lockers…well they just need to be where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there.
Owner’s Locker has two secret weapons behind our curtain: our website and our warehouse management system. The warehouse management system is our custom-designed barcode tracking software. Every time your Locker changes location, it’s movement is tracked by our scanners. It also organizes all of the data entered into our site by Members about their visits and tells us which Lockers need to where and on what day. It can even tell us which van to use and which resorts to visit in which order. And here’s my favorite function: when your Locker comes back into our warehouse, the systems measures its “velocity” and, if you have been coming a LOT, it tells us to store your Locker in a location toward the front of the warehouse so it will be easier to get to next time!
We are also very proud of our website which has been designed to make it easy for our members to use. Easy to sign up. Easy to schedule or change a Visit. The website collects all of the data you enter, shares it with our warehouse management system, charges you the appropriate amount and then communicates all of this to us and you. It’s the website that sends you all of the e-mails confirming your visits, letting you know your Locker is about to be delivered and when it has made it safely back to the warehouse.
The most complicated part of the site is something you’ll never see and that is the billing. With most e-commerce sites, you buy something, you get charged and that’s it. The Owner’s Locker site has three different types of charges to deal with (the one time Membership Fee, the recurring Annual Plan fee and the extra Visit fee. Add to that the multiple Locker discounts off the Membership Fee and the Visit fees.
The conversation Brian and I were having with Alex yesterday involved tweaks to the site to address Members who order additional Lockers. We realized that unless we did something, the Lockers would have different Anniversary Dates. Can you imagine asking our Members to try to remember that Locker 1 had a free delivery for the year starting June 15 and locker 2 had a free delivery for the year starting August 3. The obvious answer is to pro-rate the Annual Plan charge for the additional Locker so that they both have an Anniversary date of June 15. That makes it easy for the Member but it means quite a bit of behind the scenes programming on the site to make that happen automatically.
Another challenge for Alex but better that he has a tricky issue to program for than giving our members fits, don’t you think?
JDVM
www.ownerslocker.com
