Case Study: Returns on Demand
App that Facilitates the Return of Merchandise
Returns On Demand and Melt Studio, have been working on taking the founders’ idea of an app that facilitates the return of merchandise from online purchases, to a real product for idea validation and iteration to find the Product-Market Fit.
Initial state
Some of our results
3 Developers
Team Size
2.5 months
Time to MVP
160 Online
Retailer's processing capability
10 Private
Beta testers
Major Retail
Partner Integrations
The Challenge
We Needed to Create a Mobile iOS Application First
in 3 months, to be delivered to real customers and receive feedback to be able to iterate the product and find an MMP Minimum Marketable Product.
Our Solution
The first step in this project was to develop a prototype of the consumer application.
Requirements
Simplification
This technology stack avoids the risk of high-cost development teams and high-speed development, by keeping the requirements in skills simple.
Application
Building
For this, we built an application using React Native/Expo and a simple Firebase backend to create an initial iOS app allowing users to initiate the returns.
Prototype
Release
After the initial prototype release, we created a simple admin system using React, keeping the whole platform in Javascript/Typescript. Over time we have also released the application to Android users.
After getting customer feedback
There have been multiple improvements
The first one is a Gmail integration allowing users to import purchases directly from their email. This required an audit from Google to ensure security practices in handling people's data. The audit was performed by a partner of Google in close collaboration with the melt development team and successfully passed.
Second, a large retail partner entered conversations with Return On Demand, presenting an interesting business opportunity. Melt and Return On Demand have adapted the roadmap to take advantage of this partnership and delivered a seamless integration for the partner’s customers.
Current state
“The Melt team is an extension of the internal Amatis team because of their personal investment with our product”
Rana Mohamed
Amatis