The Perfect Order

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The Perfect Order

Imagine being able to see what we have in stock on our shelves in real-time, knowing that “the perfect order” will make it into the back of your car or to your doorstep after checkout.

To us, the “perfect order” is a complete eCommerce order — no shorts or substitutions — and it’s the standard we’re constantly working towards. Just like shopping in our stores, we want our customers to be get exactly what they need every time they use Curbside or Home Delivery.

“Our goal is to fulfill exactly what they order,” says H-E-B Staff Engineer Briana Garcia. “We want the online shopping experience to be as seamless as the in-store experience. We always think like a customer, because we are customers.”

Real Time Inventory

The first step towards reaching our goal of fulfilling the perfect order was getting to a point where we can show real-time inventory. Currently, the digital catalog on HEB.com and the H-E-B app is updated in near real-time based on in-store inventory changes. If an item is scanned as in-stock, it will show online. If it’s scanned as out-of-stock or the units-on-hand reaches zero, it will fall off online.

However, creating and building this solution took time. “We started by designing and building the infrastructure to support a near real-time data capture pipeline to ingest and publish data across internal systems as changes happen.” Briana shares. “Timeliness and data completeness on heb.com and our mobile apps is vitally important to our business, so our top priority was to minimize latency in processing our data.”

Cart Validation

The next release required Cart Validation Service. With this update, the H-E-B website and apps now check for out-of-stock items in a customer’s cart. If there are any out-of-stock items in the cart, the customer is notified and prompted to remove those out-of-stock items before going to checkout. From there, customers can return to search to find suitable replacements.

Lance Spears, one of our Senior Engineers, shares how integrating this feature was a smooth ride thanks to H-E-B developers always keeping the future in mind. “You could tell the developers who put the code in place originally kept the future of this technology at the forefront of their minds. We didn’t have to rebuild something or work a hack to make it function. Integrating with the current state of the code was seamless.”

Thinking like a Customer

We believe in the work we do. We are committed to creating high quality products and services designed to meet the needs of our fellow Texans. We constantly put ourselves in our customers’ shoes to gain a better understanding of what they need and want and then work tirelessly to deliver that.

“As H-E-B customers ourselves, we also get first-hand experience with the features and tools we build. When I’m delighted by a feature that enhances my online shopping experience, I feel good knowing I was a part of the team who built that. We really are “Texans Helping Texans,” Lance shares.