For multi-store & omnichannel retail
Your till, your online store and your supplier all think you have different stock.
One of them is wrong, usually all three, and finding out which costs someone half a day a week.
Read this bit first. This is written for retailers running three or more stores, or ten or more staff, or a real online store alongside the shop.
If you’re a single shop with a handful of staff, we’re not the right people — you’d be paying us to make a small problem slightly smaller, and there are cheaper answers. Come back when you open the second store, and we’ll mean it.
The systems you’re already running
And why the joins between them are where the trouble lives.
Most NZ retailers this size are on Lightspeed Retail — which is what Vend became. Vend was built here, was bought for a few hundred million, and plenty of Kiwi retailers are still unimpressed about the migration, the price rises, and integrations that turned out not to work the way they were sold.
Alongside it: Shopify and Shopify POS, Cin7 where inventory got serious, Starshipit on dispatch, and Xero underneath.
We won’t tell you to switch platforms unless you ask. A migration is expensive, disruptive and rarely the actual fix. What’s usually broken is the join between two systems that each work fine on their own.
Where it goes
- Your till, your online store and your supplier all think you have different stock
- Purchase orders raised from memory and gut feel rather than from what's actually selling
- Click-and-collect handled by hand, with a phone call
- End-of-day takings retyped into Xero, store by store
- Supplier price increases discovered at stocktake, months after they landed
What it’s costing
Say someone spends six hours a week reconciling stock across systems and raising purchase orders by hand. That’s around 300 hours a year, at whatever that person costs you.
Then the part that’s harder to count and hurts more: overselling. One online order for stock that isn’t there is a refund, an apology, and a customer who checks a competitor first next time.
The hours are annoying. The overselling is what actually costs you money, and it’s the one we’d go after first.
What we’d automate
- Stock synced across till, online store and supplier, with low-stock alerts that fire before you run out
- Purchase order drafts generated from actual sales velocity, for someone to approve
- Click-and-collect notifications end to end, without anyone ringing anyone
- Daily takings into Xero from every store, without retyping
- Lapsed-customer reactivation using what they actually bought
Where AI earns its keep here
Supplier price lists arrive as PDFs and spreadsheets in a dozen different shapes. They get read and checked against what you’re currently charging, so a cost increase turns up as a notification the week it happens rather than a surprise at stocktake.
Purchase orders get drafted from what’s actually selling, per store, for someone to approve before anything is ordered.
What we’d skip is personalised product recommendations and customer-facing chat. That’s where every retail AI pitch goes, it needs volume you probably haven’t got, and it isn’t where your money is leaking.
Where to start
Start with a conversation
No charge and no pitch. If we’re not the right people for the problem, we’ll tell you and point you somewhere better.
Free · no pitch
You tell us what’s slow or manual. We ask the questions we’d ask any new client. By the end you’ll know whether we can help, roughly what it would involve, and what it would cost.
We work evenings and weekends, so there are a limited number of slots each week. Trades tend to ring rather than book — info@nullnil.net works just as well.