Your stock is not a simple unit, which is why nothing quite fits.
Off-the-shelf inventory software assumes one product is one thing you count. Sell kits, cut lengths, weigh goods or track expiry, and every product becomes a workaround — which is how retailers end up with software and a spreadsheet.
What changes for retail and online sellers
- Kits, variants and measures handled without a spreadsheet
- Batch and expiry enforced by the system where it matters
- Reordering driven by velocity, cover and lead time
- True margin visible per product and per channel
What goes wrong in retail and online sellers
The standard model is one SKU, one number, and it covers most sellers. It does not cover a bundle that is also sold as parts, a product bought by weight and sold by piece, or stock where batch and expiry decide what may be shipped. Each of those needs arithmetic the product cannot do, so it gets done in a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet becomes the real system.
Purchasing suffers most. Reordering should follow velocity per channel with cover and lead time factored in, and instead it follows a feeling about what moved recently — because the numbers that would inform it are spread across channels and a workbook. Cash sits in the wrong stock, and the stock that sells is the stock that is out.
What this usually runs on today
- Counter billing software plus a workbook for the real numbers
- Kits and variants tracked by hand or not at all
- Batch and expiry noted on the shelf, not in a system
- Reorder decisions made from recent memory
Recognise most of that list? It is the usual starting point.
What we build for retail and online sellers
The pieces specific to this pairing. Each is quoted separately, so you can start with one and see whether it earned its cost before committing to the next.
- 01
A stock model that matches what you sell
Kits that decrement their components, variants that share a parent, units bought and sold in different measures, and batch or expiry where it governs what may ship. The arithmetic lives in the system instead of in a workbook.
- 02
Purchasing from real velocity
What is selling, how fast, and where, with cover, lead time and reorder points calculated. Purchasing becomes a decision you make from numbers rather than a guess you defend afterwards.
- 03
Orders through one operational flow
Pick, pack, label, dispatch and return in one queue with the exceptions visible — short picks, splits, part-shipments. The exceptions are the whole job on a busy day, and they are what generic tools handle worst.
- 04
Margin per product and per channel
Landed cost, channel fees and returns attributed properly, so you can see which products and which channels actually make money. Revenue per channel is easy to get and frequently misleading.
Questions we get asked about this
Should we not just integrate what we have?
Probably, and that is the honest first answer — see the integration version of this page, which is cheaper and faster. Building is right when the stock model itself is the problem: if no product on the market can represent what you sell without a workaround, connecting those products together only synchronises the workaround.
Do we have to stop using our counter software?
Not necessarily. Where the counter system works for billing and your staff are fluent in it, it can stay and feed stock movements in. What we would not keep is two systems both claiming to be authoritative about the stock number — one has to own it.
How is a decade of product and sales history handled?
As a migration in its own right, with reconciliation you can check: counts and totals matched between old and new, and a report you read rather than a promise you accept. Some history should be archived as searchable records instead of migrated, and we will say which.
Want to know what this would involve for your business?
Forty-five minutes on how your operation actually runs, then a written summary of what we would fix first. Free, and yours to keep.