Finisher's Warehouse has a customer app on Google Play

Finisher's Warehouse's customer app went live on Google Play today. It is free, and it is for the store's account customers: the cabinet shops, finishers, painters and contractors who buy from them every week. If you have an account there, you can sign in right now.

Finisher's Warehouse is a wood finishing supply store in Phoenix: paints, stains, lacquers, abrasives and spray equipment. I built their website and online catalog and I run their local search. The app is the next piece of the same thing: their counter and their customer accounts, on a customer's phone.

What a customer can do with it

• Sign in with a code. The email or mobile number on the account, a one-time code, and you are in. No password to remember.
• Shop at your own pricing. Search the catalog by name or SKU, or browse by brand and category, and every price shown is the price on your account, with what is in stock.
• Follow your orders. Every order and quote with its status and what is still due, the items on it, and the invoice PDF right in the app.
• Pay your account. See the balance, the aging and the open invoices, then pay the whole balance or tick just the invoices you want to pay, by card or straight from your bank account. The statement PDF is there too.
• Lists. Save the products you order all the time, or turn a past order into a list, so the next order starts from the last one.
• Light or dark. It follows your phone.

Card and bank details go into Stripe's own secure payment form. The app never stores them, and paying by bank links your account through Stripe as well.

How it is built

It is a native Android app, written in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose. It is not the website in a wrapper. It moves and feels like the rest of your phone, and an invoice opens right inside the app instead of sending you off to a browser.

Behind it is the system the store already runs on. The balance, the invoices, the prices and the stock all come from SyncERP, the point of sale I built that runs the counter, through the same customer account the website uses. So the app and the counter never disagree: an invoice paid on the phone is paid at the register, and a price set at the store is the price in the app. There is no second copy of anything to keep in sync.

Why a supply store needs an app

I give business owners a simple test for whether they need an app: do the same people come back again and again to do something? A supply store's account customers do. They reorder the same products, check what they owe, and pay at the end of the month. Those are jobs for something on the home screen, not a website they have to sign in to on a phone every time.

It is built the same way as Moon Valley Med Spa's patient app and my own customer app: native, on the same system as the website, with the store submission handled.

If you have an account at Finisher's Warehouse, install it from Google Play and sign in with the email or mobile number on your account. If you run a store and want the same for your customers, see the screens on the apps page, or look at what this means for a paint store.