How long did it take to build and roll out this platform?

The full build — consumer e-commerce storefront, franchise operations portal, Pick-N-Mix product builder, and multi-region pricing — took 6 months from kickoff to launch. That included replacing over a decade of accumulated legacy tooling, so the timeline was aggressive but manageable because the two interfaces (consumer and franchise) were developed in parallel rather than sequentially.

Does this approach work if we don't need a custom product builder like Pick-N-Mix?

Yes — the Pick-N-Mix builder was the hardest, most bespoke piece of this project precisely because off-the-shelf SaaS storefronts don't support customer-assembled, weight-priced bundles. If your catalog is fixed-SKU, standard e-commerce platforms already handle that well, and the bigger wins here — the franchise operations dashboard, automated onboarding, and royalty reconciliation — apply just as directly without needing custom product logic.

What was the biggest risk in a project like this?

The biggest risk was getting multi-region tax and pricing wrong — confectionery has different VAT/GST treatment than general merchandise in several of the 10+ territories supported, and a mistake there risked both compliance exposure and visible checkout errors. That's why locale-aware pricing and tax rules were built as a core platform capability rather than a per-market patch.

Could a smaller franchise network justify this kind of platform?

The core pattern — a franchise command dashboard, template-driven onboarding, and automated royalty reconciliation — pays off even for networks with a handful of locations, since the pain (spreadsheets, email reports, manual month-end reconciliation) starts early and compounds with every new store. Smaller networks would typically start with the operations portal and reconciliation automation first, adding the custom product builder only if their catalog genuinely needs it.

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Retail & FranchiseSaaS Application DevelopmentDevOps Consulting

Global Retail & Franchise Management Platform

Modernising a multi-region confectionery brand with a unified consumer e-commerce and franchise operations portal, replacing a patchwork of legacy tools with a single platform built to scale across continents.

Modernised global retail presence supporting $1.25M+ in tracked franchise sales

Client

Confidential — International retail franchise

Industry

Retail & Franchise

Timeline

6 months

Technologies

8+ tools

The Challenge

!Consumer-facing e-commerce and franchise management ran on disconnected legacy systems that had accumulated over more than a decade of regional acquisitions. Store managers in different territories were working from spreadsheets, emailed reports, and a point-of-sale system with no shared data layer, which meant head office had no single source of truth for sales or inventory.

!Inventory alerts and franchise performance data were not visible to regional managers in real time, so stockouts were often discovered only after a customer complaint or a missed sales target. A low-stock signal in one territory could take two to three days to reach the team responsible for replenishment, by which point popular bundles had already sold out.

!The brand needed a custom Pick-N-Mix shopping experience — customers select individual sweets to build their own bags and boxes — which is not available on off-the-shelf e-commerce platforms. Every major SaaS storefront builder they evaluated treated products as fixed SKUs, with no native concept of a customer-assembled bundle priced by weight or item count.

!New franchise onboarding required significant manual configuration of pricing tables, product catalogs, and regional settings, which was slowing international expansion at exactly the moment the brand wanted to accelerate it. Each new store took a developer and an operations analyst the better part of a week to bring fully online.

!Multi-region support needed localised pricing, currencies, and tax rules across 10+ territories, several of which had materially different VAT/GST treatment for confectionery versus general merchandise. Getting this wrong risked both compliance exposure and visible pricing errors at checkout.

!Franchisees had no way to see how their store compared to peers, which made it difficult for head office to identify underperforming locations early or to spread best practices from top performers. Performance conversations were reactive rather than data-driven.

!The legacy checkout could not reliably handle promotional bundle pricing, so seasonal campaigns (holiday gift boxes, limited-edition Pick-N-Mix themes) required manual price overrides by engineering staff — a process that was slow, error-prone, and did not scale as the number of active promotions grew.

!Reporting for franchise royalties and commission reconciliation was done largely by hand at month-end, consuming finance team time and introducing a lag between a sale happening and it being reflected in royalty calculations owed to the parent brand.

Our Solution

Built a dual-interface platform: a consumer-facing e-commerce store optimised for conversion and browsing, and a separate franchise operations portal giving store managers and regional leads role-based access to the data and tools they actually needed.

Developed a custom Pick-N-Mix product builder with real-time inventory checks and bundle pricing logic, letting customers assemble bags and boxes item-by-item while the system validated stock availability and calculated weight- or count-based pricing on the fly.

Created a Franchise Command Dashboard showing per-store sales trends, inventory alerts, and new store openings on a single screen, giving regional managers the same visibility that had previously required chasing down multiple spreadsheets and phone calls.

Automated franchise onboarding with template-driven configuration — pricing tiers, tax rules, and catalog defaults are now provisioned from a region template and adjusted rather than built from scratch, reducing setup from days to hours.

Implemented multi-currency, multi-tax-region support with locale-aware pricing displayed per storefront, so each franchise sees compliant, correctly formatted pricing without engineering involvement for every new market.

Integrated advanced analytics showing sales performance, product velocity, and a global footprint heatmap, so head office can spot underperforming stores and successful product lines at a glance and act on the data rather than guess.

Rebuilt the promotional pricing engine to support rules-based bundle discounts and time-boxed campaigns configurable by non-engineering staff, removing the manual price-override bottleneck during seasonal launches.

Automated royalty and commission reconciliation by tying every transaction to its franchise location and region-specific royalty rate at the point of sale, giving finance a real-time ledger instead of a manual month-end exercise.

Measurable Impact

Franchise sales tracked

$1.25M+

Real-time revenue visibility across all franchise locations in one dashboard, replacing manual regional reporting.

Franchise onboarding

~5 days → under 4 hours

Template-driven setup cut new franchise configuration time from roughly a week to a single afternoon.

Territories supported

10+

Multi-currency, multi-tax platform handles localised pricing and compliant tax treatment per market.

Inventory alerts

2-3 days → under 5 minutes

Automated low-stock alerts now reach regional managers within minutes of a threshold being crossed, down from a multi-day reporting lag.

Royalty reconciliation

Zero manual entries per month

Commission calculations tie directly to point-of-sale transactions, eliminating manual month-end reconciliation work.

Promotional launches

70% faster campaign setup

Regional teams can configure bundle discounts and seasonal campaigns without engineering support, cutting turnaround from days to hours.

“Our old system couldn't tell us which stores were running low on stock until it was too late. Now our operations team has everything in one view, franchisees are happier, and finance isn't reconciling royalties by hand anymore. It changed how we run the whole network.”
H
Head of Digital Operations
VP Engineering, International Retail Franchise (NDA)

Technology stack

ReactNode.jsPostgreSQLStripeRedisAWSTerraformNext.js