Volunteers of America Chesapeake & Carolinas (VOA) is a faith-based, non-profit organization whose mission is to empower self-reliance and inspire hope. VOA receives large pallets of donations from community resource partners (CRPs).
VOA opened a warehouse to accept donations from organizations. They needed a way for their team to scan the donated items by a universal product code (also known as a barcode), which then becomes populated within an e-commerce website. Other nonprofits and organizations would be able to purchase the donated items for their own charitable causes.
Bytelion’s Solution:
We built an Android tablet barcode scanning application and eCommerce website. Once a Resource Center team member scans in a donated item using the barcode scanner in the application, they are able to add in the quantity while automatically generating the product name and barcode code. The magic for the Android tablet lies within a very powerful tool called Barcode Lookup API, which is a database of roughly 160 million different products. Our application interfaces with UPC, UPC-E, EAN, ISBN, and Code39 barcodes.
After the submission from the Android tablet application, the product is added to the total inventory in the Magento 2 Admin Panel. The administrator is able to add the price and enable the product’s visibility in the store. The team decided to use Magento 2 to build the eCommerce website because the platform can be scaled up to support several affiliates.
We connected the Magento 2 store with QuickBooks Online account so their accounting information is synchronized, including customers, products, sales, and invoices data. Therefore, the VOA can better manage accounting data more effectively.
The Resource Center needed a way for nonprofits to apply to the Resource Center in order to receive the items at discounted prices. On the end user’s eCommerce website, we developed a custom module within Magento 2 to have applicants submit their nonprofit’s 501(c)(3) return, 990 tax return. On the Magento 2 admin panel, we built a custom module to allow the Resource Center’s team to review all of the submitted documents and either accept or deny the nonprofit entry into the eCommerce website.
