The before — four systems, four different counts.
Selling outdoor gear across channels is an inventory problem wearing a retail costume. “Shopify thought we had twelve of a jacket. Lightspeed said eight. NuOrder had committed four to a wholesale order. The spreadsheet said something else entirely,” says Cole Mercer, Owner. “Every channel was confident and every channel was wrong.”
The cost showed up as oversells and angry customers, items sold online that the store had already sold, wholesale orders promised against stock that didn’t exist. Reconciling four counts was a weekly job, and it was always already stale by the time it finished.
$660/month across four tools. Weekly manual stock reconciliation. Recurring oversells from channels that didn’t share a count.
The switch — one catalog to rule them.
Forge & Field imported one master catalog, mapped every channel to it, and turned the others off. The first time a store sale dropped the online count in the same second, Mercer said the team actually applauded.
“The migration was a long afternoon of SKU cleanup we’d been avoiding for years anyway,” he says. “The platform just forced us to finally have one list.”
What got replaced
| Old tool | Replaced by Mewayz (Formerly Seemless) module | Monthly saving |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify | Online Storefront | $105 |
| Lightspeed POS (×3) | POS & Inventory | $300 |
| NuOrder | B2B / Wholesale Store | $160 |
| Inventory spreadsheet | Unified Catalog | $95 |
| Total old stack | Mewayz (Formerly Seemless) Business | save $660/mo |
The unlock — one number everyone trusts.
With every channel reading one catalog, the whole operation tightened:
- A sale on any channel decrements the same count instantly
- Wholesale commitments reserve real stock, not optimistic stock
- Reorder points fire from true totals across all three stores
- Month-end stock value is a glance, not a reconciliation project
There’s no sync lag to exploit when there’s only one count. The store and the website aren’t two systems being reconciled, they’re two windows onto the same number.
The new normal — buying with confidence.
“I used to place reorders half-blind and hope,” Mercer says. “Now I trust the number, so I buy tighter and carry less. The savings on the software bill are real, but carrying less dead stock is the bigger win we didn’t even pitch ourselves on.”