E-commerce · Operations · Automation

From 45 Hours of Manual Work Per Week to Running on Autopilot

41hrsSaved per week

The Situation

A fashion retail brand operating across Shopify, Amazon, and Noon was drowning in operations. The founder and two staff spent about 45 hours per week on manual inventory syncing, order processing, pricing updates, and cross-platform listings. Margins were getting eaten alive — sitting at 12% and declining because every minute spent on operations was a minute not spent on sourcing and marketing.

They'd tried Zapier-style automations. Broke constantly. They'd tried a freelancer who built a custom script. It worked for 3 weeks and then nobody could maintain it.

What We Built

An integrated operations platform connecting all three storefronts with centralized inventory management, automated pricing rules, synchronized order processing, and real-time margin tracking across every channel.

Not a plugin. A custom system tailored to their exact workflow, handling the specific edge cases that off-the-shelf tools can't — like Noon's category-specific commission structures and Amazon's FBA split calculations.

Connected everything to an ERPNext instance for financials, stock management, and supplier ordering — turning three disconnected sales channels into one unified business view.

The Results

Weekly manual operations
Before
45 hours
After
~4 hours (reviews + exceptions)
Profit margins
Before
12%
After
18.2%
Revenue growth (6 months)
Before
Flat
After
+35%
Pricing errors per month
Before
15-20
After
<1
Stock-out incidents
Before
8-12/month
After
1-2/month
Time to list new product (3 channels)
Before
3-4 hours
After
22 minutes

What Made This Work

We didn't start with the tech. We sat with their team for a full day, watched them work, mapped every manual step. Found that 70% of their time went into 3 tasks — those became automation priority one.

Built with ERPNext as the backbone. When they're ready to add B2B wholesale or new channels, the system expands without a rebuild.

Trained their team to handle exceptions themselves. We built tools people can use, not black boxes they depend on us for.

What We'd Do Differently

We automated the inventory sync before fully understanding their supplier data format. First week had 30+ SKU mismatches that required manual cleanup. We fixed the data pipeline, but the client lost about 2 days of accurate stock data. On the next implementation, we now run a 48-hour parallel test before cutting over. We also focused on operational automation first and deferred the customer-facing experience improvements. Revenue went up because margins improved, but the frontend is still the original design.

Ready for results like these?

Tell us what's costing you money. We'll show you what we'd build to fix it.