Good Dog Design Uses Twilio to Make Sure the Cake is Not a Lie
Time to read: 2 minutes
April 21, 2011
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Wendy’s, the famous Australian ice cream franchise, came to Good Dog Design with a problem: they wanted to sell cakes online, but many of their stores had no way to handle Internet orders. Good Dog Design came up with an elegant ordering system using Twilio’s Voice API that would allow stores to take orders without having to buy any new hardware. When a customer purchases a cake on Wendy’s website, a call is made to the store and the order is spoken and confirmed over the phone. Here’s what Henry, developer at Good Dog Design, had to say about the delicious project:
How did you decide what to build your application? What problem were you trying to solve?
Our client is an iconic Australian franchise that wanted the ability to sell ice cream cakes online. The concept was that users could come into the online store, select the cake they wanted, and then choose the store where they were going to pick the cake up from. The only problem is that very few of the hundreds of stores around Australia have any communication on site other than the a telephone. Twilio allowed us to quickly and easily hook up our ordering system so that the individual stores themselves were called once an order is made. The calls have been set up to automatically occur at set times during the day allowing staff to have the ordering system call back if they are too busy. Employees must confirm receipt of the order via the phone to ensure the order has been received and finalized. The happy user simply shows up a few days later to collect their cake!
How long did it take to build your app, and what technologies did you use?
The entire site redesign and shop build had to be completed within six weeks. In order to get a complex idea up and running in such a short period of time we selected Shopify for the online store, and then created a custom built Rails application to tie Shopify, Twilio, and Wendy’s store admin together.
What are your plans going forward?
The plans for the Wendy’s store is to slowly expand to include their complete cake selection, currently it’s limited to their top 12 selling cakes.
Are you working on something cool? Send an e-mail to rahim@twilio.com. We love hearing what people are doing with Twilio.
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