The Challenge
Blackthorn Commerce sells premium homeware across Shopify (own site), Amazon UK, Amazon EU, and through a wholesale channel. They use a third-party logistics (3PL) provider for warehousing and fulfilment. On any given morning, their operations manager was logging into five separate systems to get a picture of what had sold overnight, what needed to be dispatched, what inventory was running low, and which carrier was performing worst.
The daily briefing meeting — attended by 8 people — was largely spent consolidating information from different team members before any actual decisions could be made. By the time the meeting ended, some of the data was already an hour out of date.
The peak season problem
During peak trading (November–January), the inability to spot inventory issues quickly resulted in two stockout events on best-selling SKUs. Lost revenue from these two events alone was estimated at £85,000. A real-time inventory alert system was non-negotiable for the next peak.
Our Solution
We built a unified ops dashboard with four data connectors and a configurable alert engine — designed to give the ops manager a complete picture in under 30 seconds each morning.
Multi-Channel Order View
Orders from Shopify, Amazon UK, and Amazon EU displayed in a unified queue with status (pending, dispatched, delivered, returned) and channel attribution. Updated every 5 minutes during business hours, every 30 minutes overnight.
Live Inventory Tracking
Stock levels pulled from the 3PL's WMS via API, cross-referenced against pending orders to show real available stock (not just physical stock). Colour-coded RAG status per SKU with configurable low-stock thresholds.
Carrier Performance Monitor
Tracks on-time delivery rates and exception counts per carrier (Royal Mail, DPD, Evri) by channel. Highlights abnormal exception rates early so operations can escalate to the carrier before customers complain.
Proactive Alerts
Slack and email alerts for: stock below reorder threshold, order processing backlog building, carrier exception rate spike, and daily revenue vs forecast. The ops team stops monitoring and starts reacting only when needed.
Technical Approach
The 3PL integration was the hardest part. Their WMS API was underdocumented and had rate limits that required careful management during peak sync windows. We built a caching layer using Redis that stores the last-known state and only requests delta changes from the WMS, dramatically reducing API calls while keeping the dashboard responsive.
Amazon's Selling Partner API required an IAM role setup and careful management of token refresh — a process that trips up many integrators. We've done it enough times to do it reliably.
Technology Used
Results
"We survived peak with one ops manager instead of three people firefighting. The stockout alerts paid for the platform on day one of Black Friday — we caught a fast-mover going critical at 11am and placed an emergency reorder the same afternoon."
