A hi-fi store where the website, the tills and the marketplaces sell the same stock

Stock is the whole problem. The stock lives in HiPOS, spread across nine branches and a warehouse, and it changes every time a till rings. The website and the marketplaces need that picture in near real time, and their orders need to land back in the EPOS without anyone retyping them. Keep stock by hand and a 65-inch TV sells twice. Keep orders by hand and the warehouse picks from yesterday's list.

The range is the second problem. Hi-fi models are replaced every season. Deleting an old product throws away years of search rankings and leaves customers on a 404. Leaving it live sends them to something they can't buy. Large items such as big-screen TVs need their own delivery rules, and a customer spending four figures expects finance, a trusted wallet and a specification they can read before they commit.

One storefront, wired into the systems the shops already trust. Wired In Commerce extended AspDotNetStorefront rather than working around it. The EPOS stays the source of truth, and the website, search index, feeds and marketplace listings all read from the same data, so they never disagree about what is in stock.

Technical highlights

• HiPOS is the source of truth — WCF services sync products, prices, stock and store data from the EPOS into the catalogue. Web orders are exported back to HiPOS by scheduled processes. Nobody rekeys an order, and every channel sells from the same stock figure.

• Search that understands hi-fi — FACT-Finder replaces the default search, fed from the catalogue with suggestions, filters and merchandised sorting. A Lucene.Net engine sits behind the same abstraction as a fallback. Placeholder-priced products are kept out of the feed, so search never shows an item that can't be sold.

• Discontinued products keep their value — when HiPOS marks a model as discontinued, the sync moves it into a dedicated discontinued category automatically. The page stays live with noindex and nofollow, canonical tags and 301 redirects point search engines at the replacement, and back-in-stock alerts tell customers when a line returns.

• A checkout built for big-ticket baskets — SagePay, PayPal and Amazon Pay sit beside Pay By Finance, whose application, acceptance, referral and decline steps all run inside the checkout. Extended guarantees are offered at the point of sale, and carrier rules hide unsuitable delivery methods for large TVs.

• Rich content without data entry — Etilize supplies manufacturer specifications and imagery. Reviews come from Reevoo, Trustpilot and TestFreak, with a native review form alongside. Automated lozenges and cable and speaker wizards help customers choose the right product.

• Responsive, fast and measurable — the front end was rebuilt on Zurb Foundation with combined and compressed scripts and stylesheets, a dedicated mobile checkout and a full HTTPS migration. Product feeds and tags serve Google, Criteo, Awin, TradeDoubler and Emarsys from the same catalogue.

The integration layer

A dedicated integration platform keeps HiPOS and the storefront in step, in both directions. Wired In Commerce built it as a set of WCF services and scheduled processes that write to the storefront's own database. Products, prices, stock and images arrive from the EPOS. Orders and their payment and finance details go back. HiPOS calls the integration service whenever products, prices or stock change, so the site never has to poll the tills.

• Catalogue (HiPOS → web) — brands, categories, stores, specification taxonomy, then full product upserts with variants, pricing, related products, warranties and cable pairings.

• Prices and stock (HiPOS → web) — batch updates per store: the online store sets web stock, the nine branches feed per-store availability and collect-in-store.

• Media (HiPOS → web) — streamed uploads for 15 image and document types, resized on the server into the storefront's own image sizes.

• Web orders (web → HiPOS) — a scheduled Windows service exports new orders with addresses, VAT, coupons, shipping and SagePay data.

• Order status (HiPOS → web) — line-item status, dispatch with tracking number, and refunds.

• Finance (web ↔ HiPOS ↔ Hitachi) — finance orders reach HiPOS only once accepted; dispatch triggers a notification to Hitachi Capital.

The engineering choices that made it dependable:

• Contract-first, built in parallel — a shared library of about 30 data contracts and 13 service operations was agreed first. Stub services returned realistic responses, so the HiPOS team built against the API before the real one existed.

• Batches that never fail as a whole — every item in a list update is processed and reported on its own, keyed by its HiPOS ID. One bad product does not block a thousand good price changes, and HiPOS learns exactly which item failed and why.

• Orders that cannot be lost — an order is only flagged as exported after HiPOS confirms it. Anything that fails is picked up again on the next run, with no manual re-send.

• One source of truth for URLs and images — the services call the storefront's own SEO naming and image-resizing code. A product synced from HiPOS gets the same URL and image sizes as one created in the admin, and its new URL is returned to HiPOS.

• Built to be supported — errors are logged by severity, critical failures raise an email alert, and every inbound payload can be captured to file for diagnosis.

• Marketplace-ready — the same layer includes a ChannelAdvisor connector for eBay and Amazon listings, variations, batched stock and price updates, dispatch and refunds.

Before

• Web orders rekeyed into the EPOS

• Stock could differ between shop, site and marketplace

• Old models deleted, taking their rankings with them

• Finance handled outside the online journey

After

• Web orders flow into HiPOS automatically on a schedule

• Every channel sells from the same HiPOS stock figure

• Discontinued products move category and keep their URLs

• Customers apply for finance inside the checkout