Retail
Two channels, one business — or two businesses pretending.
Retailers rarely struggle to sell. They struggle because the shop and the website hold different stock numbers, different customers and different versions of the truth.
How the business actually runs
Before any software is discussed.
Stock lives in a point-of-sale system in store and a storefront online, reconciled by hand or not at all. A customer who buys in store is anonymous; the same person online has an account. Promotions run in both places with no shared measurement. Buying decisions are made from revenue, not margin.
- Multi-site stores
- showrooms
- wholesale and omnichannel retailers
Where the money leaks
Four leaks we see in almost every one of these businesses.
Not generic inefficiency — the specific places where revenue, margin or time escapes a retail business.
- 01
Stock that disagrees with itself
Overselling online and dead stock in a back room are the same problem seen from two ends: no single inventory picture.
- 02
The in-store customer you never met
Without capture at the counter, your best customers are the ones you know least about, and your marketing talks only to the online half.
- 03
Promotions nobody measured
If a discount cannot be attributed to incremental margin, it is a guess repeated at scale.
- 04
Buying on revenue, not margin
Reordering best sellers that barely contribute is how a growing retailer gets poorer.
The system
One connected flow, end to end.
Each stage feeds the next, and every stage is measurable. This is the shape of what we would build — the detail is decided with you.
- 01 Catalogue
- 02 Stock
- 03 Store & online
- 04 Customer record
- 05 Loyalty
- 06 Reorder
- Unified catalogue and inventory
- Point-of-sale integration
- Online storefront with click-and-collect
- Customer capture and loyalty in store
- Lifecycle messaging across channels
- Margin and sell-through reporting
- Stock accuracy between channels
- Share of in-store sales attached to a customer record
- Repeat purchase rate
- Sell-through and margin by line
A worked example
Illustrative, with the assumptions stated.
Assume
- Say a retailer runs three stores and a website
- Stock is reconciled weekly by hand
- Most in-store transactions are anonymous
What changes
- One inventory position serves every channel, including click-and-collect
- The counter captures a customer record as a normal part of the sale
- Promotions are measured on incremental margin, not on units moved
- Reordering follows contribution and sell-through rather than gross revenue
Illustrative assumptions. We start with a week of your own stock and sales data; the gap between channels is usually larger than expected.
Is this you?
Worth a conversation if any of these are true.
And worth saying plainly when they are not.
- Online and in-store stock disagree
- You cannot identify your best in-store customers
- Promotions are judged on feel
- Reordering is based on revenue alone
If you are a single store with steady footfall and no online ambition, an integration programme is a solution looking for a problem.
Further reading and other industries
Tell us how the business runs today.
We will map where the revenue leaks, show you the system that closes it, and say plainly if the numbers do not justify building anything.
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