Retail & Ecommerce Software

Retail software has one hard problem and many easy ones that only look hard. The hard one is knowing, right now, how many of an item you have and where it is. Everything else depends on it: the online store, the suggestions and the loyalty programme. None of it works if this is wrong.

Inventory is a distributed systems problem wearing an apron

The moment you sell in more than one place, you have a stock-sharing problem. Places can be a website, a marketplace, three stores, a quick commerce partner, and now ONDC. The classic failure is selling the same last unit on two channels in the same minute.

The fix is not "sync more often". The fix is to keep one true number for what you can promise, set up reservations clearly with a TTL, and never let a channel hold stock it has not reserved. A marketplace that reads your feed every fifteen minutes needs a safe extra buffer held back. Otherwise it will oversell, and the penalty lands on your seller rating, not theirs. Store stock has to be counted. Cycle counting should be a routine part of the software, not a yearly event that everybody dreads.

ONDC is a protocol, not a marketplace, and that changes what you build

Teams keep treating the Open Network for Digital Commerce like another Amazon to list on. It is not. It is a set of protocol rules that you build into a seller app or a buyer app. The network then connects you with people who have never heard of you.

The effects are real. Your catalogue must be matched to the network's categories, and this work is boring but important. Order steps follow the protocol's life cycle, not yours. Cancellation, return, and issue-and-complaint flows are set by the protocol, and you must build them properly, even the ones you would rather skip. Payments are matched against the network, not against one party you can phone. It is real work, and it is worth doing for the reach. But it is not just a listing, and anyone who sells it to you as one has not built it.

Marketplace settlements are where the margin actually goes

Amazon and Flipkart do not pay you what the customer paid. They pay the customer's payment minus a commission, minus a closing fee, minus shipping, and minus whatever else they decided to deduct this week. It comes as one lump sum for hundreds of orders, on their schedule.

If your finance team matches this in Excel, they are not really matching it. They check that the total looks fine and move on. The deductions nobody checked are pure lost margin. We build a tool that reads the settlement report, matches every line to an order, and works out what the deduction should have been under your commission agreement. When it does not match, it adds the order to a list of differences. The money recovered usually pays for the module within a year.

The rest, briefly

Returns are 20 to 30 percent of fashion GMV, and the returns process deserves as much planning as delivery. GST across states, with the right place-of-supply and HSN codes. Store billing that keeps working when the internet does not, and syncs when it comes back. And a product catalogue that handles options like size and colour properly, because a catalogue that cannot show variants well will hold back every channel you connect to it.