Encoder Technologies

E-Commerce

E-commerce platforms that share one stock number with the shop floor

Catalogues, checkout and order operations connected to the inventory the physical counter sells from.

Problem

An online store with its own stock table, orders tracked in a mailbox, and refunds adjusted by hand.

Software

A server-rendered storefront on shared inventory, modelled order states, and returns that post to stock and accounts.

Result

No overselling of the last unit, order status answered from the system, and finance that reconciles without manual entries.

Most e-commerce failures are not front-end failures. The storefront converts, and then the operation cannot fulfil: the last unit was sold in-store an hour earlier, the courier status lives in an email, and finance reconciles by hand. We build stores as the customer-facing half of an operational system, not as a standalone site.

The catalogue, pricing and stock come from the same ledger the counter writes to, orders move through modelled states with a record of who changed what, and returns and refunds post correctly instead of being adjusted manually.

For merchants who already run a physical business, that is the whole point: online becomes another channel on existing inventory rather than a second business with its own numbers.

What breaks in e-commerce

  • Overselling the last unit

    Two channels reading separate stock tables will eventually sell the same item twice. The fix is architectural, not a nightly sync script.

  • Order state living in inboxes

    Packed, dispatched, delivered, returned — if these are emails rather than states, nobody can answer a customer question without a search.

  • Catalogue work nobody wants to do

    Variants, images and pricing rules are entered by staff. A bad admin screen quietly caps how large the catalogue can get.

  • Performance that costs sales

    Product and category pages are what search engines rank and customers wait on: they need server-rendered HTML, real image optimisation and honest Core Web Vitals.

What we build

  1. 01

    Storefront

    Server-rendered catalogue, search and filtering, product pages built for indexing, and a checkout designed for mobile-first traffic.

  2. 02

    Order operations

    Order states, picking and packing views, courier handoff, returns and refunds, and a customer-facing status page.

  3. 03

    Shared inventory

    One stock ledger across online and physical channels, with reservation at checkout and reconciliation on fulfilment.

  4. 04

    Merchandising and SEO

    Structured product data, canonical URLs, collection pages that earn their place, and analytics that attribute revenue.

Other industries

FAQ

E-Commerce — questions

WooCommerce, Shopify, or custom?

Whichever the operation justifies. A platform is reasonable for a straightforward catalogue. We build custom when pricing rules, tenancy or inventory integration are the hard part — which is most of what we are asked for.

Can the store use our existing POS inventory?

That is the preferred design. Where the POS exposes an API we integrate against it; where it does not, we make the inventory service the shared source for both channels.

Have a product in mind?

Tell us what you're building, improving or automating. We'll help turn the idea into reliable software.