Unifying a customer ecommerce storefront with admin ERP operations.
A digital commerce platform for a specialist horticultural and gifting retailer — joining an Angular storefront with a full back-office ERP for catalog, checkout, payments, fulfilment, inventory, purchasing, and reporting.
Seasonal specialist retail could not run on manual handoffs.
Customers needed a content-rich plant and gift buying journey, while catalog, stock, fulfilment, and purchasing still lived in fragmented tools with no single source of truth.
Content-rich specialist buying
Plants, trees, hedging, and gifts needed guided discovery — not a static product list.
Seasonal demand complexity
Availability, bundles, delivery rules, and order changes made manual intervention unsustainable.
Fragmented operations
Catalog, customers, orders, fulfilment, and purchasing spanned ecommerce and warehouse with no unified workspace.
Limited operational visibility
Stock, workload, refunds, payments, communications, and content quality lacked clear reporting.
Client
Specialist horticultural retailer
Industry
Ecommerce & retail operations
Integrations
Stripe · Contentful · Searchspring · Klaviyo
Engagement
Storefront + admin ERP platform
What we learned before we designed anything
Discovery showed specialist horticultural journeys and seasonal operations needed one connected platform — not separate storefront and warehouse tools.
Specialist tools matter as much as cart
Plant finder and pollination checker were essential to the horticultural buying journey.
Ops lived in fragmented tools
Internal teams coordinated manually across disconnected systems instead of one workspace.
Fulfilment must survive change
Seasonal availability meant stock and delivery processes needed resilience, not point-in-time accuracy alone.
Content and campaigns must stay aligned
Advice, blogs, banners, CMS pages, newsletters, and feeds had to keep pace with seasonal marketing.
Reporting must stay usable
Stock, orders, sales, VAT, and website quality data only help if organised for day-to-day decisions.
Storefront and ops split apart
Specialist retailers often separate commerce UX from warehouse tooling, creating fulfilment gaps.
Thin specialist content
Few platforms combine advice tools like plant finder with full transactional commerce.
Fragmented operational reporting
Comparable stacks scatter stock, sales, and quality reports across multiple systems.
Alex
Operations and fulfilment lead
Goals
- • Prepare orders quickly and accurately
- • Keep stock and purchasing aligned with demand
- • Give teams clear visibility into orders and exceptions
Pain Points
- • Fragmented operational tools
- • Manual sales-to-warehouse coordination
- • Limited visibility into workload and stock exceptions
One commerce platform, four connected applications.
Angular SSR storefront and admin portal sit on shared Node/Express customer and admin APIs — with payments, CMS, search, marketing, reviews, and support wired through integration services.
Customer experience and ERP operations as one system.
Guided buying, checkout, fulfilment automation, and role-based admin reporting share the same transactional core.
Static listings could not support specialist plants, seasonal demand, or guided discovery.
Guided horticultural commerce
- ✓Categories, search, recommendations, advice, plant finder, and pollination checker in one journey
- ✓Cart, delivery rules, promotions, gift vouchers, and Stripe/Paysafe checkout as a single flow
Catalog, order, stock, and purchasing lived in fragmented tools with constant manual coordination.
One role-based operations workspace
- ✓Order preparation, barcode scanning, plant labels, stock movement, suppliers, and purchase orders
- ✓Shared Node/Express admin APIs keep ecommerce and warehouse on the same data
Teams lacked usable visibility into exceptions, stock risk, and future workload.
Decision-ready operational insight
- ✓Reports for stock, orders, sales, VAT, customers, and website quality
- ✓Exception views for incomplete orders, no-delivery-date cases, OOS messages, and orphan products
Marketing, payments, CMS, search, reviews, and support were brittle when bolted on separately.
Connected commerce services
- ✓Stripe, Paysafe, Contentful, Searchspring, Klaviyo, Feefo, FreshDesk, and SendGrid/Mandrill
- ✓AWS-backed media/file ops for content, imports, and exports across the platform
Built for seasonal ecommerce and warehouse reality.
Angular SSR for discoverability, Node/Express APIs for commerce and ERP logic, and a deep integration stack for payments, content, search, and customer engagement.
Map the full journey, then connect storefront and ERP.
Discovery covered catalog through purchasing; delivery organised four applications sharing transactional services and operational automation.
Discovery
Mapped discovery, specialist content, checkout, fulfilment, supplier purchasing, and reporting end to end.
Platform strategy
Defined Angular storefront, customer API, Angular admin portal, and admin API as four connected apps.
SSR storefront
Used Angular server-side rendering for SEO-friendly performance with complex catalog and advice data.
Operational automation
Automated fulfilment documents, plant labels, supplier notifications, invoices, shipments, and credit memos.
Integrations & governance
Wired payments, CMS, search, marketing, reviews, and support with role-based admin access controls.
What customers and ops teams use daily
What changed after launch
Faster fulfilment preparation - Selected orders, batch documents, picking lists, plant labels, and shipment/invoice creation sped warehouse work.
Improved stock discipline - Mass stock tools, movements, availability reporting, stock-take, and supply-need purchasing tightened inventory control.
Better exception handling - Reports surfaced incomplete orders, missing delivery dates, OOS messages, orphan products, and future workload.
Less manual communication - Customer emails, supplier notifications, newsletters, review feeds, and FreshDesk reduced chase work.
Greater management visibility - Sales, banking, VAT, margin, stock valuation, customer, product, and website quality reports in one place.
Connected digital operating model - Customer experience, commerce data, and fulfilment execution reinforce each other on one platform.
Challenges & Learnings
SSR vs catalog load
Balancing a content-rich SEO storefront with complex catalog data needed careful SSR and caching.
Storefront and admin as one system
Order, stock, invoicing, shipment, and refund flows only worked when treated as a connected platform.
Integration ownership
Many external services required clear boundaries to avoid fragility across payments, CMS, search, and support.
Specialist retail rules
Bundles, blocked shipping dates, delivery timetables, and seasonal supply needed dedicated logic.
Usable reporting
Data-heavy reports had to prioritise views operations teams actually use day to day.
Where the platform goes from here
The project gives a stronger digital foundation by joining the customer buying journey with the operational controls needed behind the scenes.
“Teams manage product, order, stock, content, and fulfilment from a purpose-built admin portal, while customers get a more guided and reliable online experience. Customer service teams also have better visibility of orders, history, and support workflows.”