Retail technology is rarely one system. It is a storefront, an EPOS, a stock position, a fulfilment partner and a marketing platform, each with its own idea of what a product is. The customer experience is the visible part; the reason it breaks is usually further back.
We build both halves: the customer-facing experience, and the operational tooling and data work that lets it be accurate. That includes the unglamorous part — reconciling the same product or customer appearing differently across systems, and fixing collection at source so the reporting stops disagreeing with itself.
Insights
One product, four answers
Ask four retail systems how many of something you have and you will get four numbers. The reconciliation that follows is a symptom, not the problem.
Read the articleReplatforming is not a strategy
The plan to replace everything at once is the plan that never finishes. Most estates are improved by deciding what stays, not what goes.
Read the articleReturns are a data problem wearing a logistics costume
Returns get managed as a warehouse cost. Most of the rate is decided much earlier, by information that was wrong or missing on the product page.
Read the article
How we support changemakers in retail
Set up and run teams
We work alongside your people rather than at arm's length, and we are as comfortable with the operational side as the storefront. Most retail problems are not on the product page.
Launch new products
We build to production standards from the first sprint, with the peak trading period in mind from the outset rather than as a load test the week before.
Discover new propositions and customer experiences
We work out what is worth building before anything gets built: research with real customers, prototypes that can be tested cheaply, and honest commercial framing of what each idea is likely to return.
How we strengthen your team
Product data that holds together
The same product appearing three different ways across four systems is the root of most retail reporting problems. We fix collection at source rather than reconciling downstream forever.
Integration with what you already run
ERP, EPOS, payments, fulfilment and marketing platforms rarely get replaced together. We build around what is staying as much as what is changing.
Reporting you can act on
Dashboards that answer the questions a buyer or a store manager actually asks, rather than a data warehouse nobody opens.
One customer across every channel
A shopper who buys in store, returns online and contacts support by email is three records in most estates. We resolve identity across channels so the history is one history — which is what makes service, loyalty and lifetime value figures mean anything.
Returns treated as feedback
Return reason and rate attached to the product and the variant, not just the order, and visible to the buyer at the point of reorder. Some lines are only unprofitable after returns, and the numbers usually sit in two different budgets that never meet.
Peak that holds
Trading peaks are predictable and are still where most retail incidents happen. We load test against the actual peak shape rather than an average, cache what can be cached, and make sure the failure mode is a degraded page rather than a checkout that stops taking money.
White paper
Joining up storefront and stockroom data
Why retail reporting so often disagrees with itself, and what it takes to get one version of a product, a price and a stock position across the systems you already run.
Let’s talk
Have a problem you need to solve or an idea you want to explore? Let’s talk about how we can make it happen.