Most retailers we meet do not have a website problem. They have inventory living in three places, an ecommerce platform that does not know what the store sold this morning, and someone reconciling it by hand every night.
The store, the warehouse and the online catalog each believe something different. You find out when you oversell an item and have to send the apology email.
Marketplace, wholesale, a pop-up. Each one is a new place orders arrive and a new export someone has to merge, so growth adds hours instead of removing them.
Revenue per SKU is easy. Landed cost, returns, storage time and the discount someone applied to move it are usually in different systems, so the ranking that decides what to reorder is often wrong.
The process works, in the sense that customers get refunded. What it does not do is tell you which products come back, why, and what that costs you across a season.
One source of truth, with everything else reconciling to it on a schedule you can see. Includes the exception report for when two systems disagree, because they will and you want to know before a customer does.
Orders from every channel landing in one queue with consistent rules for allocation, backorder and split shipment, instead of a person merging exports at the end of the day.
Landed cost, returns rate, storage time and applied discounts joined to revenue, so the list you reorder from reflects what actually made money rather than what sold most units.
Page speed and checkout friction on the pages that carry your revenue. This is unglamorous work and it moves conversion more reliably than a redesign does.
Retail stacks accumulate. The question is rarely which platform to buy next, it is which of the ones you have should be the source of truth for each kind of data, and what reconciles the rest to it.
Almost never. Shopify handles storefront, checkout and payments better than a custom build will, and cheaper. What it does not handle is your specific operational logic across channels, and that is where a custom layer alongside it makes sense. Replacing the storefront is usually the expensive mistake.
Yes, with one caveat worth saying out loud: something has to be the source of truth, and everything else reconciles to it. Most sync problems are not technical, they are two systems that both think they are authoritative. Deciding that is the first hour of the project.
Possibly, and we will tell you. A single location with one sales channel usually gets more from a better website and a tighter POS setup than from custom software. This work starts paying when you have multiple channels or locations disagreeing with each other.
We do not deploy anything structural in your peak. Whatever launches goes live well before, with the load it will actually see tested, and the freeze window agreed in writing at the start. Learning your system breaks on Black Friday is not a lesson worth having.
Tell us which part is costing you the most right now. If the answer is something you can fix without hiring us, we'll say that on the call.
Tell us what you need and we'll get back to you. No commitment, no sales pitch.
Salomon Web Services