The situation

A 12-person e-commerce operation was selling across three channels — their own store, a marketplace, and a wholesale portal — and consolidating everything manually. Every morning, someone spent two or more hours copying orders from each source into a central spreadsheet, which then fed their inventory and fulfilment systems. The process was error-prone: wrong quantities, missed orders, and fulfilment mistakes that led to customer complaints and refund costs. The team member doing it described it as the worst part of their job.

What we built

We built a unified data pipeline that connects all three order sources to a single normalised data layer. When an order comes in from any channel, it's automatically pulled, standardised, validated, and pushed to both the inventory system and the fulfilment system within minutes. Validation catches anomalies — unusual quantities, missing fields, duplicate orders — and flags them before they cause downstream problems rather than after.

Results

• Morning data entry process eliminated entirely — zero manual intervention required
• Order-to-fulfilment time cut from same-day-if-lucky to under 15 minutes
• Fulfilment error rate dropped to near zero in the first month
• Team member redeployed from data entry to customer service — a role that actually needed them