A chain of 6 stores was losing sales every day because online and in-store stock didn't communicate
A retail chain with 6 physical stores and an online shop faced a recurring problem: customers bought products online that no longer existed in the warehouse, and physical stores didn't know which items were sitting idle on the e-commerce platform. Refunds piled up, online reputation degraded and the team spent hours manually managing inventory. This case shows how a centralised integration solved the problem in weeks.
The Problem
Physical store stock was managed in a local POS system and the online shop ran on a separate Shopify instance. There was no synchronisation between the two. When a product sold out in a store, the website kept selling it, and vice versa. The result was cancelled orders, frustrated customers and negative reviews.
The team attempted manual reconciliation at the end of each day, but with over 2,000 SKUs across 6 locations, errors were inevitable. Promotions made it worse: online campaigns generated sales spikes that emptied stock without stores knowing. The online cancellation rate reached 18%.
What We Did
We developed an integration layer that unifies stock from every channel into a single source of truth:
- Real-time bidirectional synchronisation between each store's POS and the e-commerce platform
- Smart stock reservation rules: each channel has a configurable safety margin to prevent overselling
- Automatic minimum stock alerts by product and location, with suggestions for inter-store transfers
- Unified dashboard with inventory view by store, online channel and aggregate, accessible from any device
- Performance reports by channel with sell-through, turnover and margin metrics by category
Implementation took 6 weeks. In the first week we mapped all existing data flows. In weeks 2-4 we built and tested the POS-ecommerce integration with one pilot store. In weeks 5-6 we expanded to the remaining 5 stores and trained the team.
The Results
In the first 60 days after full integration:
Orders cancelled due to stock shortages dropped from 18% to under 2%. The system automatically blocks sales when real stock hits the minimum.
With reliable stock and fulfilled deliveries, ratings climbed from 3.2 to 4.6 stars and online sales grew by 20%.
The manual reconciliation that occupied one person half-time was eliminated. The dashboard updates in real time.
The elimination of cancellations and increase in sales allowed the investment to be recovered in just 8 weeks.
"We finally have a single view of our stock. Customers buy with confidence and we've stopped losing sales to errors that shouldn't exist."
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