Your stock number is accurate in four systems and true in none of them

Fragmented systems don’t only create a data-quality problem, they create a labor problem. Cin7’s data puts it at 16 hours every week, per person, manually syncing stock across e-commerce, POS, warehouses and fulfillment systems — 104 workdays a year, at roughly $21,632 annually for a single entry-level associate.^[1] That is close to a full-time job that doesn’t scale, doesn’t forecast and doesn’t win you a channel. Run it across a multi-location network with even a small central team and the reconciliation line runs into the hundreds of thousands.

StoreConnect keeps stock synchronized across every channel and location because there is only one set of numbers to keep. Stock levels and stock locations are Salesforce records your team already works from, and the storefront, the point of sale and the warehouse all read the same ones. Your team stops asking whether the numbers reconciled and starts asking whether the forecast is right and whether stock is positioned where the margin is.

When visibility is fragmented, it fails in both directions: customers see stock that isn’t really available, so you promise a pickup you can’t fulfil; or they see a stockout when the item is sitting in the wrong location, or was simply counted wrong.

Both directions are expensive. Inventory distortion — stockouts and overstock combined — costs global retail more than $1.7 trillion a year, roughly two-thirds of it lost sales.^[2] When a product is genuinely unavailable at the moment someone wants it, retailers lose nearly half of all intended purchases; the customer buys elsewhere or doesn’t buy at all. Upwards of 20% of online cart abandonments trace back to a stockout message.^[4] Nor is this only an e-commerce problem: retailers lose an average of 6.4% of gross sales to in-store operational failures, and inventory accuracy is the biggest driver of that for pickup and collection services.^[5]

Built-in sync gives you one inventory view across locations and channels, so customers see availability that is actually true. Stock is never oversold, and never hidden as out-of-stock when you are holding it somewhere else.

Sell through your own site, a marketplace, your stores and a wholesale partner out of one stock pool and allocation stops being obvious. Without rules, what happens is predictable: one location oversells while another sits on idle stock.^[6] A discount channel eats inventory meant for a premium one. Warehouse stock earmarked for store replenishment disappears into an unexpected web surge. No single person sees the conflict until the margin is already spent.

It hurts most for retailers building out BOPIS or ship-from-store, because those methods only work with the right stock in the right location at the right time. Internal scarcity, where your own channels compete for the same units, makes reliable fulfillment impossible.

StoreConnect lets you hold stock by location and channel, so allocation follows your channel priorities and local demand instead of whoever happens to order first. Premium channels get first claim on high-margin SKUs, slower-moving stock flows out to discount channels rather than the reverse, and the rules are configuration — not a negotiation between teams every morning.

Buy online, pick up in store reached $154.3 billion in U.S. retail sales in 2025 and is on track for $177.9 billion in 2026, up 15.3%. The appeal runs both ways: customers skip the shipping fee and collect in minutes, and you skip the expensive last mile while pulling footfall back into the store — where 85% of BOPIS shoppers have gone on to buy something else.^[3]

None of that arrives unless the inventory is real. If someone orders for collection and you can’t fulfil it, you don’t just lose the transaction, you teach that customer never to trust collection again. Peak-hour congestion, staging space and counter friction all compound when staff are hunting for stock you have already promised.

StoreConnect shows availability per location from the same stock records the store itself is selling from, online and at the counter, so a pickup promise is a promise you can keep — and that incremental basket actually materializes. Your stores become fulfillment locations, not just retail ones.

When orders can ship from several locations, true cost per order should be arithmetic: pick and pack labor, packaging, carrier fees from that origin. Without integrated visibility most retailers instead route to the “nearest” or the default warehouse. Nobody knows whether collection from a local store beats shipping from the central warehouse, so the order simply ships from wherever.

The bill lands in three places: transportation cost inflated by poor origin choice, handling labor inflated by orders split across locations to fill one basket, and carrier contracts that were never optimized across the network. McKinsey puts the prize at 5–20% off logistics cost, and 20–30% off inventory levels, where planning is done well.^[2]

StoreConnect holds fulfillment against stock locations and shipping providers per channel, so cost per order becomes visible by method and location and routing becomes a decision rather than a default. An order from a customer near one of your stores can be collected there; one that is cheaper from a regional warehouse ships from the warehouse.

Carrying cost — warehouse rent, labor, insurance, utilities, taxes, shrinkage, obsolescence and the capital tied up in all of it — runs at about 20–30% of average inventory value a year.^[2] On a $1 million inventory that is $200,000 to $300,000 annually just to hold the stock; the commonly accepted target is closer to 15–25%.^[7]

When forecasting is weak because visibility is fragmented, that cost lands on the wrong stock. Seasonal lines don’t clear fast enough. New products overstock because the central view didn’t know the web channel had already moved half the forecast. Slow SKUs sit on shelf space and square footage that high-turnover items needed.

One shared view across channels and locations gives forecasting real demand signals to work from, so excess shrinks and the carrying-cost dollars you do spend sit on stock that turns.

The old omnichannel playbook was centralized automation: one large, highly automated warehouse that processes everything. It only pays off with the density to justify the build and the geography to serve customers quickly. Retailers with dispersed customers found centralized automation couldn’t flex to local demand, seasonal swings or the delivery speeds customers now assume.

The current playbook is distributed: use the locations you already own as fulfillment nodes. Stores are already paid for, which makes them the cheapest fulfillment capacity available — and, unlike a warehouse lease, a reversible one. It is working at scale: Walmart now delivers 35% of store-fulfilled orders in under three hours, and among U.S. grocery shoppers pickup has overtaken same-day delivery, 31% to 29%.^[5]

That model depends entirely on built-in sync across locations, so you can see where each SKU actually is and route accordingly. StoreConnect runs ship-from-store, collection and warehouse fulfillment off the same inventory foundation, which means you scale by unlocking capacity already on your balance sheet rather than by building more of it.

StoreConnect is a native Salesforce application, so inventory, orders and fulfillment sit on standard objects — Products, Prices, Orders, Accounts, Stock Levels and Stock Locations — in the org that already runs your CRM and your data. There is no third-party inventory system to bolt on, no separate sync layer to keep alive and no second source of truth to reconcile.

Because it is native, the integrations you already depend on — ERP, accounting and invoicing, warehouse management, document generation — keep working against the same Salesforce records, with minimal configuration and none of the manual re-entry that stitching separate systems together creates. Our partner ecosystem handles implementation and integration alongside your team.

Go-live is normally phased: web plus your existing POS locations plus one fulfillment method — collection or ship-from-store — in the first phase, with further locations and methods added on top of the same foundation afterwards.