THE ORDER YOU CANNOT FILL
The worst day a retail site has is not the day it goes down. It is the day it stays up and keeps selling something the warehouse ran out of nine hours ago. The customer gets a confirmation email, then an apology, then a refund, and you have paid acquisition cost for a negative experience. Do that through a holiday weekend and the review scores take a year to recover.
It happens because the storefront and the systems that know the truth about stock are only loosely connected — a nightly CSV, a plugin that syncs when it feels like it, a staff member exporting from the POS on Mondays. Every one of those is a window during which the website is confidently wrong.
We treat the integration as the product. What is the authoritative source for stock, price, and availability; how fast does the storefront learn about a change; and what does the site do when the answer is unavailable? Get those three right and the storefront stops being a separate business from the shop.
This page is about retailers and multi-location operators. If you are a consumer brand selling your own products direct, the constraints are different and the CPG ecommerce work is the closer fit.
STOREFRONTS THAT KNOW WHAT IS IN STOCK
CLIENT TRANSMISSIONS
VERIFIED OPERATOR FEEDBACK // CLEARANCE LEVEL: PUBLIC
"Nicklaus was absolutely fantastic to work with. He completely transformed our website for The CPG Co-Op, and the end result is better than I could have imagined. What really sets Nicklaus apart is that he’s not just a great designer—he has a deep understanding of the technical side of websites and the backend functionality that makes everything work. He was able to take a fairly complex project, handle the technical details seamlessly, and still make the entire process incredibly easy for me as someone who is, frankly, a total luddite when it comes to this stuff. He also built the site in a way that makes it incredibly easy for me to manage and make changes myself, which means we aren’t constantly paying someone every time we need to update something. That was a huge win for us. He was responsive, collaborative, incredibly fast, and genuinely cared about getting it right. I would highly recommend Nicklaus to anyone looking for someone who can bring the creative vision and the technical expertise to actually execute it. He made the whole process easy—and delivered a website we absolutely love."
EMILY KEALEY
FOUNDER // THE CPG CO-OP
ON THE CPG CO-OP
STRAIGHT ANSWERS
DO YOU BUILD ON SHOPIFY OR SOMETHING CUSTOM?
Whichever fits. Shopify is genuinely the right answer for a lot of retailers and we will say so rather than sell you a bigger build. Custom becomes correct when your catalog logic, integrations, or pricing rules stop fitting the platform’s model and you find yourself paying for six apps that half-work. We make that call during scoping, with reasons.
CAN YOU CONNECT OUR POS AND INVENTORY SYSTEM?
Usually. Square, Lightspeed, Shopify POS, NetSuite and most modern systems expose a workable API. Older systems sometimes offer only scheduled file exports, which changes what we can honestly promise about real-time accuracy — and we tell you that up front rather than after launch.
WHAT HAPPENS TO OUR RANKINGS IF WE REPLACE THE STOREFRONT?
They survive if the migration is handled properly: URL mapping, redirects, structured data, and internal linking preserved deliberately. They do not survive if someone treats the rebuild as a design project. This is the same discipline the website redesign work is built around, and it is the part cheap rebuilds skip.
CAN YOU HANDLE A PEAK TRAFFIC EVENT?
That is what the architecture is designed for. Edge caching, infrastructure that scales with demand, and load testing before the date that matters — not a fixed box that has been fine all year and has never seen forty times normal traffic.
WE HAVE MULTIPLE LOCATIONS. CAN EACH ONE HAVE ITS OWN INVENTORY?
Yes, where your systems can tell us what is at each location. Per-store availability and pick-up-in-store are among the highest-converting features in retail, and also the ones most likely to embarrass you if the data behind them is stale. We confirm the data quality before building the feature on top of it.
HOW IS THIS DIFFERENT FROM YOUR CPG ECOMMERCE WORK?
CPG ecommerce is for consumer brands selling their own products direct — subscription logic, wholesale portals, and retailer handoffs. This is for retailers and multi-location operators selling other people’s products alongside their own, where inventory truth and omnichannel are the hard parts. Same engineering, different centre of gravity.
SHOW US THE STOCK FEED.
Tell us what runs your inventory and how the storefront learns about it today. We will tell you where the storefront is currently lying to your customers — within 24 hours.