Industries

Retail & E-commerce

Your platform sells fine. It just does not know what is sitting in fourteen stores.

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How it works today

At some point somebody set a fixed safety buffer of three per SKU to stop overselling. Nobody remembers who. Since then the last three pieces of every article have been unsellable online, and the e-commerce manager who lowers that number has customer service on the phone within a week about an order a store had already sold over the counter.

What is in the store does not sell online

Fourteen shops full of stock the webshop cannot see. The connection sends one number per SKU with no location behind it, so ship-from-store and selling another branch's stock at the till have been on the roadmap for three years. The fixed buffer of three takes another three pieces off every article. CBS measured the gap in 2025: pure online retailers grew 7.4 percent, retailers with a store and a webshop 1.9 percent.

The webshop sells what is already gone

A nightly CSV export from the till system gets called realtime. The stores keep selling all day, so in the morning the webshop sells pieces that left the shelf yesterday. On bol an order lands on stock reserved for click and collect. Every cancellation counts towards the service norms, and the service norms decide your buy box. Customer service explains it, and the store manager takes the blame for stock he does not control.

The same article, described four times

In the ERP, in a spreadsheet, in the webshop and in the bol feed. Every channel wants its own attributes and image ratios, and a collection launch takes weeks because one mandatory attribute is always missing and the listing gets blocked. Since GPSR took effect on 13 December 2024 it is a safety question too: manufacturer details, the EU responsible person and warnings have to exist as structured fields and flow to every channel, in Dutch.

A return is two jobs and one piece of dead stock

Returns are graded, credited and put back on stock by hand, usually only in the DC, so what a customer hands back at the till goes into a van first. The average return rate was 23.5 percent in 2025, and 40 to 50 percent on clothing. Handling one costs 10 to 20 euro and can swallow up to 35 percent of the gross margin on an order. The Returnless benchmark measures more than three weeks before it is sellable again.

What we build for this sector

Not a menu of products. These are the pieces that tend to pay for themselves first in this line of work.

Custom storefront or headless front end

Most retailers do not need this. You do when the configurator needs more than three options per product, still the Shopify ceiling even after the variant cap went to 2,048 in October 2025. Also when bills of materials and installation are part of the sale, when B2B and B2C share one storefront, or when the front end has to pass WCAG 2.1 AA. On top of your existing checkout.

Part of E-commerce & Webshops

Connections between POS, webshop, ERP and channels

Middleware between the till system, the e-commerce platform, the ERP, the WMS or 3PL, the shipping platform and the marketplaces, doing the translation and the error handling. Almost everything here has an API: SW-Retail, Picqer, Monta, Shopify, Exact Online, the bol Retailer API. The design work sits in the budgets: Shopify's GraphQL Admin API gives 100 points a second as standard, so a full catalogue sync cannot be brute-forced through it.

Part of System Integrations & APIs

One stock truth across stores and channels

A stock service that tracks physical, reserved and free stock per SKU per location, and decides per channel which number gets published using rules instead of a fixed buffer of three. It recalculates on every till receipt, every order and every goods receipt instead of overnight. Store stock becomes sellable, which is the precondition both of those roadmap items were always waiting on.

Part of Inventory & Order Management

Product data and price history that hold up

Enrich in one place, with per-channel field mapping, so a single change lands on every feed instead of in four separate files. Underneath it, price history per SKU per channel where the lowest price of the past 30 days is calculated rather than typed. Almost no standard platform stores that history, and the ACM has been supervising it since 19 September 2025.

Part of Data Platforms & Pipelines

Order routing and return handling

Route on channel, warehouse or store, with the carrier attached. Return intake with grading at the counter: condition and reason recorded, credit issued automatically, and the piece written straight back onto that store's stock instead of after a trip to the DC. 65 percent of retailers now charge for returns, but 79 percent of shoppers walk away over a policy they dislike. Faster handling helps, higher fees do not.

Part of Business Process Automation

Your own back office and a store app

The screen that does not exist yet: one place where the e-commerce manager sees and changes channel prices, stock rules, product data quality, return reasons and marketplace performance. bol had roughly 52,000 sellers in mid-2023 and 43,300 on 31 March 2026, so that channel now rewards whoever runs it rather than whoever is listed on it. Plus a store app with pick lists for click and collect and ship-from-store.

Part of Internal Tools & Admin Panels

Systems we connect to

The sharpest question in any connection here: do you publish physical stock or free stock, and which reservations count? A click and collect order, an open bol order and a return nobody has scanned yet are three different kinds of reserved, and most stock differences between till and webshop start there. One date is already fixed: iDEAL to Wero has to be migrated by 31 December 2027, merchants included.

Shopify
WooCommerce
Adobe Commerce
Shopware
Lightspeed Retail
SW-Retail
MplusKASSA
Exact Online
AFAS
Picqer
Monta
Sendcloud
MyParcel
Mollie
Adyen
Channable
ChannelEngine
EffectConnect
Akeneo
bol Retailer API

This is not an exhaustive list, and we are not a reseller for any of it. If a system has an API, a database, or an export, we can usually work with it. If it does not, we will tell you that before you spend anything.

Rules you work under

Four of the five rules below ask for a field you do not have: the lowest price of the past thirty days, the manufacturer's address, the weight and material composition per article, and a reasoned decision per report. The regulators are Dutch even where the rule is European: the ACM, the NVWA and the ILT.

European Accessibility Act (EAA): Applicable since 28 June 2025, implemented in the Netherlands through the Implementatiewet toegankelijkheidsvoorschriften producten en diensten. The standard is WCAG 2.1 AA across the whole funnel. In practice it fails on the components a theme brings with it: size and colour pickers, filters, modals and datepickers, plus visible focus and errors a screen reader can read. An accessibility statement belongs with it.
ACM Leidraad prijsweergave en -vergelijkingen: In force since 19 September 2025. A crossed-out was-price has to be the lowest price you actually charged in the preceding 30 days, so you need price history per SKU per channel per country and a calculated value rather than an input field. Step-by-step clearance may point back to the original price for roughly three months. Fines run to 4 percent of annual turnover or 2 million euro.
GPSR (EU) 2023/988: In force since 13 December 2024, supervised by the NVWA. The manufacturer's name, postal address and email on every product page, an EU responsible person if the manufacturer sits outside the EU, product identification with an image, and all warnings in Dutch. Traceability of supplier and buyer is kept for 10 years. In software: fields that flow to every channel, plus a recall route down to the batch.
Digital Services Act (DSA): Supervised by the ACM since 4 February 2025. Allow reviews and that part of your webshop is a hosting service. That requires a contact point with at least two channels, at most one automated, a findable notice button for illegal content, and a reasoned decision per report that you keep. A review module stops being a front-end feature and becomes a case flow.
UPV Textiel: Applies to anyone who first places textiles on the Dutch market, importing webshops included. The report over 2025 is due with Rijkswaterstaat at the end of July 2026, and the ILT reported in February 2026 that the scheme is still largely unknown. In software it means weight and material composition per article, and volumes placed on the market per article group per year.

What changes

A family-owned non-food retailer with 14 stores, one webshop, around 55 staff and just over 20 million euro in turnover.

Today

Webshop stock comes from an overnight POS export, with the fixed buffer of three still in it. Click and collect orders arrive at the store by email and get printed and left at the till. Ship-from-store does not exist because store stock is invisible online. Roughly 120 bol orders a month are cancelled for stock that was already gone, which hits the service norms and the buy box. Returns are processed in the DC only.

After

A stock service becomes the owner of the truth. Free stock is physical minus reserved minus a rule-based buffer per channel and per article group, recalculated on every transaction rather than once a night. On top of that, a store app as a PWA on the iPad already in the shop: pick list for click and collect, pick and pack for ship-from-store with a Sendcloud label, and return intake with order lookup. Publication to the webshop and to bol runs on webhooks.

The result

The buffer of three disappears, so 14 store stocks come up for sale online, last three pieces included. Cancellations fall because the published number is correct. Stores get orders on a screen, and a return taken at the counter is back on stock the same day.

An illustrative scenario based on how work in this sector is typically organised, not a specific client.

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Questions from this sector

We just moved to Shopify Plus. We are not rebuilding the platform.

You should not, and we are not asking you to. The platform stays the storefront and the checkout, with the payment stack untouched. What we build sits behind it: stock logic across channels, product data, the return flow, B2B pricing. That is where the twenty-four apps came from in the first place, because every gap in that layer got filled with another subscription. If your problem genuinely is the storefront itself, a replatform is a different conversation and usually a more expensive one.

We run Lightspeed eCom and hear the C-Series is being phased out. What should we do?

Treat it as a data project, not a design project. The C-Series is being phased out toward the E-Series, built on Ecwid, and historical data such as old invoices does not migrate across automatically. eCom also stays a separate system from Lightspeed Retail, so the stock and order link between webshop and till is yours to solve either way. Start by securing the history you must keep, then decide where the storefront goes. The same logic applies to Adobe Commerce, where 2.4.5 extended support ends on 11 August 2026.

Our POS supplier will not let anything connect.

Usually that turns out to be less absolute than it sounds. SW-Retail publishes a REST API, Picqer has REST plus webhooks, Monta has a REST API, and most Dutch POS vendors have some integration route. If there really is no API, we build around the exports and imports that do exist, and we tell you up front what that costs you: latency, no realtime reservations, and a reconciliation step. What we will not do is pretend a nightly file is a live connection.

Is the accessibility law really our problem? The theme comes from our supplier.

It is yours. The obligation sits with the party offering the service, which is you, not with whoever wrote the theme. The European Accessibility Act has applied since 28 June 2025, it points at WCAG 2.1 AA, and you are only exempt below 10 employees and 2 million euro turnover. Repairing it now is cheap: most of it is forms, focus states, contrast and the size and colour pickers, and that is work you can plan. After the first complaint reaches the ACM it is a date somebody else sets.

Related sectors

Wholesale & Distribution

Ordering portals that read live customer prices and stock straight from Exact or Business Central, plus the 2BA and GS1 data behind them. For a sales desk that cannot hire.

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We build beside your TMS, not over it: koppelingen, cost per rit including the vrachtwagenheffing, a chauffeursapp that needs no training, and a portal that stops the status calls.

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Between your ERP and the shop floor: digital job tickets, machine data, nacalculatie per order. Hours that are in Ridder iQ, Isah or MKG the same day, and a margin per order the DGA sees for the first time.

Let's talk about your operation.

Describe how the work flows now, including the parts held together by spreadsheets. We will tell you what is worth building and what is not.

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