Retail & E-commerce
Unified commerce fails on inventory accuracy long before it fails on experience. If the stock number is wrong, every channel built on top of it inherits the error.
Where multichannel retail comes apart.
Store, warehouse and online each maintain their own view of stock, price and customer. The gaps show up as oversells, refunds and a customer record nobody trusts.
Stock that disagrees by channel
Store, warehouse and online counts updated on different cycles, so availability is optimistic and oversells follow.
A customer in every system
Ecommerce, POS, loyalty and email each hold a partial profile, and none of them is the record.
Peak traffic is the real test
A platform that performs adequately in April is a different proposition on the busiest trading day of the year.
Margin visible too late
Promotions, returns and fulfilment cost land after the fact, so trading decisions are made on revenue rather than contribution.
Fix the inventory truth, then unify the rest.
Establish stock truth
One authoritative availability figure with defined update cycles and reservation rules per channel.
Unify the customer
A resolved customer record across POS, ecommerce and loyalty, with a clear rule for merging identities.
Design for peak
Load-tested against realistic trading peaks, with caching and degradation planned rather than discovered.
Measure contribution
Fulfilment cost, returns and promotion impact attributed to the order, so margin is visible while trading.
One version of stock, customer and margin.
What changes for the people doing the work, not just for the systems behind them.
- A single authoritative availability figure across channels
- Reservation rules that prevent oversell rather than apologise for it
- A resolved customer record spanning POS, ecommerce and loyalty
- Load-tested capacity ahead of peak trading, not during it
- Contribution visible per order, including returns and fulfilment
- Integration with the ERP, POS and marketplace feeds you already run
What we usually bring to this sector.
The things this sector asks first.
Fix first, in most cases. Replatforming is disruptive and frequently reproduces the same inventory and customer-data problems on a newer stack. If the constraint is genuinely the platform — extensibility, performance ceiling, or a vendor exit — that changes the answer, and we will say so.
By load-testing against a realistic profile well before the season, and by deciding in advance what degrades gracefully under pressure. A code freeze and a tested rollback for the trading period matter more than any last-minute optimisation.
That is usually the highest-value piece of work, and it is more about operational rules than technology: how often counts update, what gets reserved for which channel, and what the safety buffer is. The integration is straightforward once those decisions are made.
Have an idea? Let’s forge it.
Tell us where you want to go. We’ll help you get there with the right technology, delivered by a team that ships.