Designing a Point-of-Sale System to Decrease Refunded Orders at E-Commerce Platform: Applying the Requirements Engineering Process to Provide Insights into Retailers’ Preferences

The requirements engineering process is utilized to provide an e-commerce platform with insights into the most important requirements for designing a new point-of-sale system. This is considered a potential solution to decreasing refunds happening due to insufficient stock at the retailers' locations. Getting rid of refunded orders due to insufficient stock has the potential to decrease refunds from 11.66 % to 4.28 %. Through interviews and a survey, the importance of the requirements is measured. Priorities are given to the requirements based on the MoSCoW-rule. The results show that especially non-functional requirements such as the system's usability, deployability, and security are important. Furthermore, the must-have and should-have requirements identified are recommended to be included in the design. These include an analysis and reporting function, a payment processing function, automatically updated inventories which can be adjusted in case of an error, and a connection that can be established between the POS system and the e-commerce platform and the retailers’ own web shops. A share of 63.33 % interested retailers is a good indication for a successful introduction of a new POS system.