Cloud POS system for a 50-location retail chain with centralised inventory, real-time stock visibility across 45,000 SKUs, automated supplier purchase orders, and offline-first architecture — reducing stock shrinkage 30% and saving $1.8M annually.
Prestige Retail operated 50 specialty stores across Australia on 3 different legacy POS systems — two systems were end-of-life, one was a self-built Access database. There was no central inventory view: each store managed its own stock independently, resulting in chronic over-stock in some locations and missed sales due to stock-outs in others. No central reporting, no automated reordering.
We built RetailOS over 18 months: a cloud POS with Electron-based terminal apps (offline-capable), centralised inventory management for 45,000 SKUs, supplier EDI integration, automated reordering, RFID-assisted shrinkage tracking, and a central management dashboard — deployed across all 50 stores.
50 stores on 3 different systems meant no central inventory visibility, no consolidated reporting, and 3 separate vendor contracts. Store managers had no visibility into stock at neighbouring stores — transferring stock between locations required phone calls.
At 8 stores in remote locations, internet outages of 2–6 hours occurred weekly. The legacy POS systems stopped processing transactions when connectivity dropped — leading to lost sales and customer frustration.
45,000 SKUs counted manually on paper each week across 50 stores. The exercise consumed 200 person-hours per week, produced results that were already 7 days stale by the time they were entered, and still missed 5.8% of shrinkage.
Supplier purchase orders were faxed to 28 suppliers with 2-day average processing delay. Emergency orders — triggered when a fast-moving line ran out — took 4+ days to arrive. Stock-outs cost an estimated $380K in lost sales annually.
Shrinkage was tracked by exception — only when a physical count surfaced a discrepancy. By then, the cause was impossible to identify. Shoplifting, staff theft, and vendor shortfalls were all lumped together with no forensic capability.
Promotional pricing changes had to be manually entered at each POS terminal — a process that took up to 4 hours for a full-chain promotion and generated errors in 12% of stores on average.
A web-based management platform with Electron-based POS terminal apps at each store. The terminal app runs the full POS locally — no cloud dependency for transaction processing. Receipts, inventory lookups, loyalty, and payment all work offline.
All transactions are written to a local SQLite store first, then synced to the central PostgreSQL database when connectivity is available. Conflict resolution handles edge cases like price changes during an outage. Zero transactions lost across 18 months of production.
Perpetual inventory tracking triggered by every POS sale, receiving scan, and transfer. RFID-assisted cycle counts replace manual paper counts — a full store count now takes 3 hours instead of a full day, and discrepancies are flagged immediately.
EDI-based electronic purchase orders sent directly to supplier systems. Automated reorder triggers fire when SKU stock drops below the calculated safety stock level. Supplier acknowledgment and ASN received electronically. Manual faxing eliminated entirely.
RFID readers at zone boundaries track high-value stock movement. Anomalies — items moving from sales floor to stockroom without a transfer record — trigger alerts. Location-level variance reporting identifies which stores and zones have above-average shrinkage.
Promotional prices are set once in the central management console and pushed to all 50 terminal apps via WebSocket within 30 seconds. Price consistency across the chain is guaranteed — and verifiable with a central audit log.
20 stores live, central inventory view established for the first time. First automated reorder triggered within 48 hours of go-live, saving 3 hours of manual work. Stock transfer requests between stores via digital request (vs phone calls) from day one.
All 50 stores live. Stock shrinkage reduced 30% ($1.8M annual saving). Supplier lead time down from 6 to 3 days. Stock-out incidents down 68%. Manual stock count time eliminated — 200 person-hours/month returned to store operations.
99.9% uptime across all 50 stores including during outage events. RetailOS expanded to 12 additional franchise locations without incremental development cost. Prestige Retail won Retail Innovation of the Year at the Australian Retail Association awards.
"RetailOS gave us something we'd never had: a single view of every product in every store, in real time. The shrinkage reduction alone paid for the project in 14 months. And the offline POS means our stores never stop selling — even during outages. Our store managers actually look forward to Monday morning reporting now."
Ready to modernise, scale, or build from scratch? Let's talk about your project.