From Selling Air to a Scalable E‑commerce Operation

Apologizing for orders we could not fulfill

When Alexandre began working in customer service, much of his day was spent apologizing to customers for orders the company could not fulfill as promised.

Priape operated five physical stores alongside its website, but the online store had no dedicated inventory and no dependable live stock information. The same merchandise was being sold simultaneously online and inside the physical stores.

Customers could purchase products that appeared available digitally but no longer existed physically. In Alexandre's words, the website was effectively “selling air.”

Each morning, employees gathered online orders and attempted to prepare them for shipment. Even when the system contained hundreds of orders, there were days when only approximately ten could be completed and shipped.

When an item was unavailable in Montréal but believed to be available in Vancouver or another store, the recovery process was entirely manual:

1. Customer service completed a paper requisition.
2. It was passed to the inventory department.
3. The inventory team contacted the other store.
4. A store employee attempted to locate the item.
5. The product was shipped to Montréal.
6. Montréal received and repackaged it.
7. It was finally shipped to the customer.

The wrong size, colour or item was sometimes transferred, restarting the cycle and forcing customer service to apologize again. Markdown and promotional sales magnified every weakness in the system.

The view from the inbox

The research for this transformation was not a workshop or a survey. It was months of answering the phone and the inbox — hearing the same question, “where is my order?”, from people who had trusted a screen that told them something was in stock.

That vantage point revealed the real shape of the problem: it was not a website problem, a warehouse problem or a customer-service problem. It was one broken journey that crossed every department, and nobody owned it end to end.

A storefront is not a store

The organization had outgrown an operating model that had never been redesigned when e-commerce was introduced. The website existed technologically, but operationally it was not being treated as a real store.

Alexandre advocated for a dedicated online operation with its own purchased inventory, physical stock corresponding to digital stock, consistent product data, controlled warehouse locations, and direct picking, packing and shipment.

Management wanted improved sales numbers. Alexandre's response:

The day we no longer have to apologize to all our customers is the day we will be ready to discuss better sales numbers.

Increasing demand before repairing fulfillment would only have amplified cancellations, delays and damaged trust. Fixing the operation had to come first.

One box of merchandise

The business was accustomed to its established methods. Alexandre advocated for dedicated online inventory for almost two years.

Eventually, he reduced the proposal to a small, low-risk pilot:

Listen — give me one box of merchandise. We will sell it, ship it and create happy customers.

It was an early prototype mentality: replacing repeated theoretical discussion with a controlled demonstration that could be observed, measured and trusted.

Building the operation

The organization gradually began planning merchandise purchases specifically for the website. Over several months, Alexandre developed a controlled and organized online inventory.

The company then purchased Magento and began migrating its inventory — and the migration revealed a deeper problem. Priape was approximately fifty years old, and generations of employees had entered merchandise differently. The same kind of product could appear in the system in many inconsistent forms:

• T-shirts in small, medium, large and extra-large
• Jeans and pants requiring both waist and leg-length values
• Colours, brands, styles and collections
• DVDs and products with completely different attributes
• Inconsistent names, abbreviations and category structures

Alexandre established conventions for consistent product entry and organization — standardizing names, categories, colours, sizes, dimensions and every other required attribute — before the data crossed into the new platform.

Clean data before a clean platform

A new platform could not solve the company's problems if we migrated the old disorder into the new system.

Alexandre also introduced physical warehouse-location information into the inventory system. Each product record could identify where the merchandise was stored. When an order was received, the employee could see precisely where to locate the product, making picking dramatically simpler and more reliable.

Data and the physical world finally described the same thing.

The inbox changed — and so did the numbers

The conversion rate rose by approximately 28% over roughly eighteen months. The reason was clear and expected: the orders that had been impossible to complete became real, completed sales as soon as supply and the availability of merchandise were resolved. Nothing new was sold — what was already being bought was finally delivered.

The customer-service inbox changed too. Complaints asking where orders were became thank-you messages.

By the time Alexandre left, customers sent cards at Christmas and other holidays. Some customers called simply because they trusted him and enjoyed speaking with him.