Case study · 2023 · Retail
Unified Commerce for a Specialty Retail Chain
A twelve-store specialty retailer ran three disconnected systems: an aging POS, a Shopify storefront, and a loyalty program in a spreadsheet. Stock lied to customers daily. We unified commerce on one inventory and one customer record — a custom offline-capable POS at the counter, live sync with the online store, and loyalty that finally works in both directions — so "available for pickup" became a promise the chain could keep.
Screens are illustrative recreations — client interfaces stay confidential.
The challenge
Inventory truth diverged across systems by design: the POS counted the store, Shopify counted the warehouse, and neither saw the other's sales until a nightly export — so buy-online-pickup-in-store was a support ticket generator, not a feature.
Store staff had ten seconds of patience for anything slower than the old till, and stores kept trading through internet outages — the new POS had to be faster than the old one and fully functional offline.
What we built
One inventory ledger
A central PostgreSQL-backed inventory service became the single source of truth, with every sale, return, transfer, and count adjustment — store or online — applied as events against it in real time.
A POS built for the counter
React-based POS with barcode-first flows, sub-second lookups, and an offline queue that keeps selling through outages and reconciles on reconnect — rolled out store by store with two-week feedback loops.
Storefront in the same loop
Shopify syncs bidirectionally through the inventory service — online orders reserve stock at fulfillment locations instantly, and store sales adjust online availability within seconds.
Loyalty on one customer record
Store and online identities merged into one CRM record with points, history, and preferences visible at the counter — the spreadsheet program became a cross-channel loyalty engine.
The results
- 99.0%
- Inventory record accuracy
- +24%
- Repeat purchase rate
- −35%
- Checkout time
monthly cycle-count audits, from 87.2%
two quarters after unified loyalty
median transaction at the counter
- Cycle-count audits put inventory record accuracy at 99.0%, up from 87.2% at kickoff.
- Repeat purchase rate rose 24% in the two quarters after unified loyalty launched.
- Average checkout time fell about 35%, and buy-online-pickup-in-store went from disabled to 18% of online orders.
Client identities stay confidential; figures are rounded from end-of-engagement delivery reporting.
Stack & expertise
- React
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- Shopify APIs
Industries
Technologies
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