George Street Furnishers

Project Overview

Furniture retail is a business that relies on vast numbers of stock items, product variations and accessories. Often retailers will employ specialist software to manage stock levels, the challenge being that integrations with the website can sometimes be either incomplete or inadequate to requirements.

Client Challenges

George Street contracted RetailSystem, a third party stock management platform that has extensive options for managing their vast stock inventory and products. Although the software met their needs in terms of stock management, when the retailer wanted to change their Shopify theme, the two systems stopped working together.

Our Solution

• Seperate Shopify App: We built a private Shopify app that meant if the retailer changed their theme again it would not affect the link to RetailSystem.
• Custom UI: We built a custom UI that could be used to sync individual products. This was a step up from the previous integration which only ran each night. You couldn’t update products the same day and if there had been an error with the stock data, staff needed to wait another day until it was fixed.
• Nightly Sync: We rebuilt the nightly sync functionality to share the same codebase as the Custom UI, so that changes from both methods were interchangeable. It also meant the app was much easier to test during the construction phase.

Key Features

• Stateless Application: The Shopify app doesn’t depend on a server, rather it is stored on static hosting, meaning it only exists when it is accessed.
• Ephemeral Nightly Sync: The nightly sync works on a ephemeral machine, which negates issues that can result from keeping a running server connected to the internet constantly. The temporary machine is created when the sync starts, and is destroyed when it has completed.
• Simple interface: We used Shopify’s Remix application to build the frontend, and integrated it with existing Shopify UI elements where possible. Since the table of items has over 6,000 rows, it is virtualised so as to be memory efficient.

Results & Impact

• Usability: The application is a step up from their previous solution allowing George Street more flexibility in its choice of Shopify theme.
• Reduced labour: With the nightly sync, the company is relying less on manual data entry to keep stock levels in sync with daily operations.
• Customer friendly: We also provided the code to display options in nested dropdowns allowing users easy access to all of the options associated with products.