Cascade Commerce: A Unified Retail Platform

The Problem

Cascade Retail Group, a 38-store specialty home goods chain, ran its e-commerce site, in-store point-of-sale, and warehouse inventory as three disconnected systems that synced overnight through a batch file transfer. Because inventory counts were only as current as the previous night's sync, customers regularly ordered items online that were already out of stock in the warehouse, driving a steady rate of cancelled orders and refunds that was quietly eroding customer trust and margin.

Store associates had no visibility into online inventory or orders, so buy-online-pickup-in-store requests — increasingly expected by customers — had to be handled through manual phone calls between the web team and individual stores. The aging in-store POS hardware was also nearing end-of-life for vendor support, forcing Cascade to solve the hardware problem and the systems fragmentation problem at the same time rather than sequentially.

The Solution

TechNova designed Cascade Commerce around a single real-time inventory ledger that every channel — the e-commerce storefront, the new cloud POS, and the warehouse management system — reads from and writes to directly, replacing the nightly batch sync with sub-minute consistency across all 38 stores and the online channel. This was the architectural decision the rest of the platform depended on: once inventory was truly unified, buy-online-pickup-in-store and ship-from-store became straightforward routing decisions rather than manual coordination problems.

We built new cloud-based POS terminals on the same Next.js and Node.js stack as the online storefront, so a return processed in-store immediately reflects online, and a store associate can see a customer's full purchase history — online and in-store — during a service interaction. Order management logic automatically routes each order to the optimal fulfillment location based on real-time stock levels and proximity to the customer, whether that's a nearby store or the central warehouse. On the storefront side, we replaced Cascade's outdated search with Elasticsearch-backed product search and merchandising, improving relevance for long-tail home goods queries that the old system handled poorly.

Rollout ran in two waves — five pilot stores first, validating the POS hardware and inventory sync under real transaction volume, followed by the remaining 33 stores over six weeks.

Results

Overselling incidents dropped 96% almost immediately once real-time inventory went live, eliminating one of Cascade's most persistent sources of customer complaints and refund costs. Online conversion rose 22% within the first two quarters, driven substantially by buy-online-pickup-in-store, which now accounts for nearly a third of all online orders — an option Cascade could not reliably offer under the old architecture. Store associates report meaningfully faster, better-informed customer interactions now that a single customer record spans both channels.

With fulfillment now automatically routed to the fastest available source, average order fulfillment time fell by over a third, and Cascade's operations team has since used the same real-time inventory data to improve demand forecasting and reduce excess stock across slower-moving store locations.