How an Indonesian pet retailer built one inventory across stores, warehouses, website and marketplaces

About the brand

An Indonesian pet specialty retailer selling food, treats, litter, accessories, grooming products and health lines for cats, dogs, birds and small animals. It trades through its own stores in major cities, its own website, regional warehouses and Indonesia's major marketplaces. Cats dominate the business, as they do the Indonesian pet market, where cat food accounts for the clear majority of pet food value.

Background

Pet retail looks like general merchandise and behaves like grocery. The bulk of revenue comes from food and litter bought on a repeating cycle by customers who buy the same thing every month, and the goods themselves are heavy, bulky, dated and low margin. Getting availability right is not a merchandising nicety in this category. It is the entire retention mechanism.

The retailer had grown quickly into a market where pet food spending has been rising at a double-digit rate annually, and it had added channels faster than it had added the systems to run them. By the time it approached Fynd it was operating four different versions of the truth about its own stock.

Stores ran on a point of sale that knew its own stockroom. The website carried its own stock table, updated from a nightly export. Warehouses were managed largely on spreadsheets. Each marketplace held a manually maintained buffer, set conservatively enough that available stock frequently showed as unavailable. Nobody in the business could answer, at any given moment, how many bags of a particular food the company owned or where they were.

The consequences were concrete. Customers were told a food was finished when several bags sat in a warehouse two districts away. Marketplace orders were accepted and then cancelled. Dated stock aged quietly in the wrong location. And a 15kg sack of food routinely cost more to ship than it earned.

The retailer partnered with Fynd to build a single inventory across stores, warehouses, website and marketplaces.

Challenges, solutions and impact

Challenge #1: Four systems, four different answers

The four stock positions never agreed, and each was wrong in its own direction. Store staff could not see warehouse stock, so they turned customers away rather than fulfil from elsewhere. The website oversold whatever had been bought in store during the day. Marketplace buffers were set by hand by people who had learned the hard way that overselling costs a seller rating, so they hid stock instead. Reconciliation happened monthly, in arrears, by export.

Solution. Fynd replaced the four positions with one. Fynd POS put stores on a live connection rather than a nightly export, so a sale at any till updates the same record everyone else reads. Fynd WMS brought warehouse receiving, putaway, picking and dispatch onto the system, with cycle counting rather than annual stocktakes. Fynd Konnect connected every marketplace to that single position, and Fynd OMS made every order, wherever it originated, draw from the same pool. Availability published to each channel is now an allocation rule the team sets deliberately, not a defensive guess made per platform.

Impact. Inventory record accuracy across stores and warehouses reached 98%, measured against cycle counts over the first full year, and that single position is what now publishes to every channel. Monthly reconciliation by export became continuous visibility. The commercial team could see, for the first time, total stock and total sell-through by product rather than four partial views that had to be added up by hand.

Challenge #2: A stockout on a repeat purchase is a lost customer, not a lost sale

In most retail a stockout costs one transaction. In pet food it costs the relationship. A cat that eats one food eats that food, and an owner who cannot buy it today buys it somewhere else today, then keeps buying it there. The lines most exposed were the ones the business could least afford to miss: the high-frequency staples that generate the visits during which everything else gets bought.

Solution. With one accurate position, the retailer could stop protecting each channel from the others and start protecting availability instead. Fynd OMS routes each order to whichever location can serve it, so a store without stock can still complete the sale from a warehouse or another store rather than sending the customer away. Reorder points are set against real sell-through at product level instead of channel-level guesswork, and the staples carry deliberately deeper cover than the long tail. Store stock on those staples is also reserved against walk-in demand, so serving online orders from a store never empties the shelf the neighbourhood relies on.

Impact. Stockouts on core repeat-purchase lines fell 34%. Because those lines drive visit frequency, the effect showed up beyond the products themselves, in retained customers and in the attached accessory and treat purchases that come with a restocking trip.

Challenge #3: Dated stock, and the recall nobody wants to handle badly

Food and treats carry production codes and expiry dates, and Indonesian feed labelling rules require both. Under the old arrangement that data was on the sack and nowhere else. Whichever stock was easiest to reach got picked, so short-dated goods aged behind fresher stock and were written off. More seriously, the business had no way to answer the question a recall asks: which lots did we receive, and where did they go.

Solution. Fynd WMS captures lot and expiry at receiving and enforces first-expired-first-out in warehouse picking, where directed picking and scan confirmation make it a system behaviour rather than a matter of who is on shift. Stores work from the same lot data with prompted rotation on the shelf. Short-dated inventory surfaces early enough to be discounted or moved while it still has value, and because lot data travels with the unit through OMS to the order, the retailer can trace any lot from supplier to the location that held it and the identified orders it went out on.

Impact. Write-offs on dated stock declined once picking followed expiry rather than convenience. Recall exposure changed character entirely, from an exercise in guesswork to a query, which made conversations with suppliers far shorter and made it possible to answer an authority's question with a record rather than an estimate.

Challenge #4: Freight that cost more than the margin

Pet retail sells weight. A large sack of food or litter is heavy, awkward and thin on margin, and shipping one from a central warehouse to a customer on another island could consume the entire contribution of the order. The retailer had been absorbing that cost to stay competitive online, which meant its fastest-growing channel was also its least profitable.

Solution. Fynd OMS routes every order against live stock, fulfilment capacity and the customer's location, so bulky orders ship from the nearest store or warehouse holding the item rather than from a default location. Click-and-collect became reliable, because store stock was finally accurate enough to promise against, and collection suits exactly the customer who is buying twelve kilos of litter anyway. Carriers are assigned by lane so intra-city and inter-island shipments are handled differently.

Impact. Fulfilment cost per online order fell 28%, driven by shorter delivery legs and a meaningful share of bulky orders shifting to collection. Delivery times outside Java improved, and stores became fulfilment points rather than only shopfronts.

Way forward

Next on the roadmap: subscription and auto-replenishment for staples now that stock can be reserved reliably, demand forecasting per location so regional assortments reflect local pet populations, and extending the same inventory position to prescription and vet-only lines that need tighter channel controls.

If your challenges resonate with those in this story, it's time to schedule a call with our experts. Whether you're unifying stock across stores, warehouses and channels, protecting availability on the lines your customers buy every month, or making bulky online orders profitable, our solutions are designed to streamline your operations and drive growth.

With over a decade of experience in omnichannel commerce and a proven track record with 2,300+ brands, Fynd is here to turn your challenges into success stories. Let's drive your growth together.

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