E-commerce, marketplaces and live commerce

Challenge

A fashion brand that sells through a physical store, its own e-commerce, a marketplace and sales reps ends up with the same product in five places, with five sources of truth. Stock, price, product spec sheet and order status drift apart. And the drift shows up at the sharp end as selling an item that’s out of stock, and as an order nobody knows how to bill.

Three clients in my portfolio faced variations of this, on different platforms. One of them wanted to add a new format on top: live commerce, with the order being born during the broadcast.

Solution

On the catalogue and order side, I implemented synchronisation between the ERP and the sales platforms: parent/child products with a size and colour matrix, price by table, stock, order submission, status return, and the invoice XML when the platform needs it. This covered an in-house e-commerce store, a marketplace hub, and third-party ERPs on the other end.

One of these integrations is the most complete case in the set: a drop-shipping model with an external franchise, where the partner sells and my client’s ERP reserves stock, bills and ships, with JWT authentication and stock reconciliation on both ends.

For live commerce, I built the subsystem end to end: configuration by brand, importing the orders generated during the broadcast, bulk discount application from a file, custom exchange rules, automatic financial returns, a tracking portal for the end customer, and media upload to S3.

And, at the start of the chain, a two-way bridge with the textile engineering PLM. Raw material, colour and technical attachments flow between the PLM and the ERP, and the product’s engineering mask is generated from that, so that the item reaching e-commerce is the same one designed for the collection.

Outcome

The digital channels started operating with the ERP’s stock and price, and orders from any channel enter the same billing flow. Live commerce, which used to be an event sorted out with a spreadsheet afterwards, got a process of its own.

What this case shows

I integrated e-commerce and marketplace platforms across quite different commercial models: own channel, marketplace and franchise drop-shipping. In all of them stock is a resource contested between channels and has to be treated as one. The set spans the whole chain, from product engineering in the PLM to the financial return to the end consumer.