Ecommerce Operations Platform for a Specialist Retailer
What started as a website is now the operational engine of an eight-figure specialist retailer.
Services: Ongoing platform development, custom integrations, mobile app, inventory systems, AI tooling
The challenge
A niche ecommerce retailer doing over $5M a year had outgrown what off-the-shelf platforms could handle. Multiple locations, specialist stock logic, warehouse operations, returns, wholesale, expo sales, and customer engagement all needed to run from one place — and none of it fit the shape of a standard plugin.
The result
An ongoing engagement that has evolved the website into a full operations platform: multi-location inventory, warehouse order processing, a custom POS, a Flutter mobile app, AI-assisted product imagery, supplier purchase orders, and a sales-driven stock algorithm that tells the business what to order and when.
$5M+ annual revenue
This one isn’t a project. It’s a relationship.
The client is a specialist retailer doing over $5M a year in a niche where the off-the-shelf ecommerce stack doesn’t fit. Standard platforms assume a simple model: one location, one warehouse, one way of selling. This business operates across multiple locations, sells bulk stock broken down into individual units, runs expos, takes wholesale orders, and needs warehouse, retail, and online to speak to each other in real time. No plugin covers that. So we built it.
The platform now handles inter-location stock transfers, both manual and automated, with bulk packs broken down into sellable units at the point of sale. A central warehouse hub coordinates order picking and processing, with product and order scanning built in. A custom point-of-sale system ties retail into the same stock pool as online. Returns run end-to-end without a customer ever needing to send an email — they request, the system processes.
On the customer side, a Flutter mobile app connects to the site over REST, giving customers a native experience that stays in sync with everything else. An inspiration feature lets customers share photos of finished projects using products they bought, turning the catalogue into social proof. An expo lead generation tool captures leads on the floor, subscribes them to the mailing service, and runs a lucky draw — turning an event booth into measurable pipeline.
Behind the scenes, the less visible work is where the platform earns its keep. A custom shipping integration handles the niche’s particular logistics. Multi-store sync keeps stock aligned across partner sites. Purchase orders flow to suppliers based on live inventory. An advanced inventory algorithm manages aged stock and recommends reorder quantities based on historic sales — so the business isn’t guessing what to buy or how much. AI image regeneration takes unprofessional product photos and rebuilds them with proper lighting and shadows, which matters enormously for a catalogue this size. SEO, caching, and speed optimisation run continuously in the background.
What holds it all together isn’t any single feature. It’s that every part of the business — retail, warehouse, online, wholesale, expo, supplier — runs through one system that was designed around how this company actually operates, not how an ecommerce platform assumed it would.
The site does over $5M a year. The platform is why.