Omnichannel commerce for a national retail chain
Every store, every brand, every checkout, one system underneath.
- Client
- Riverbend Retail
- Industry
- Retail
- Year
- 2024
- Engagement
- 12-month engagement
- Stores unified
- 340
- Repeat-purchase rate
- +23%
- Brands, one checkout
- 3 → 1
The challenge
Riverbend had grown into three e-commerce brands, 340 physical stores and 14 warehouses, and none of them saw the same version of the truth. Three separate catalogs. Two customer identities. A loyalty program with points that expired inconsistently depending on which channel earned them.
In-store associates couldn't look up an online order without calling a support line. Online carts didn't respect in-store inventory. The finance team was reconciling four different sets of numbers to close every month.
The board had put a hard deadline on it: unify the operating model by Q4, or start divesting brands.
Our approach
We built one catalog on an Elasticsearch-backed product graph, one identity service that reconciled the three legacy customer databases, and one cart that could span brands and channels without losing state.
Inventory sync went real-time from every warehouse and store. Associates got a store-mode PWA that shows the same catalog, cart and customer as the web, with fulfilment shortcuts for in-store pickup and ship-from-store.
The loyalty program was the interesting one. We rebuilt it around lifetime value across brands, which is what Riverbend had wanted from the start but the technology had never allowed.
The outcome
Every channel now sees the same customer, the same catalog and the same inventory. In-store fulfillment of online orders started shipping in month eight, three months ahead of the board's deadline.
Repeat-purchase rate is up 23% since the loyalty rewiring. Finance closes the month in three days now, not two weeks. Two of the three brands are running promotions that cross the third, something they physically could not have done six months ago.
Riverbend kept all three brands. The board moved on to the next question.
What people ask about this engagement.
01What does unifying 340 stores actually involve?
Mostly reconciling what each store believes to be true. Stock, pricing and customer records had drifted apart across locations and brands, so the work is less about connecting systems than about deciding which system owns which fact, then making every other one defer to it. The integration is the easy half.
02How do you merge three brands into one checkout without diluting them?
By separating the commerce engine from the brand surface. Basket, payment, fulfilment and customer identity are shared; the storefronts stay distinct in design, tone and merchandising. Shoppers get one account and one basket across the group, which is what lifted repeat purchase, while each brand still looks like itself.
03Did stores have to change how they operate?
Less than expected, deliberately. Where a store process worked, we modelled the system around it rather than asking staff to adapt to software. Retail rollouts fail when head office redesigns a workflow that the shop floor had good reasons for. The changes we did ask for were the ones where the old process existed only because the old system demanded it.
04How was it rolled out across that many locations?
In waves, starting with a small group of stores that covered the awkward cases rather than the easy ones. Each wave fed fixes into the next. By the time the long tail of stores went live the process was dull, which is the goal with a rollout at that scale.
What we shipped it on.
- Next.js
- Node.js
- MongoDB
- Elasticsearch
- Azure
Bring us the hard part.
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