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Live · In daily commercial use at a fabric retailer

Pulse

A companion app that takes the staff work out of Magento.

It was built for a fabric retailer that sells by the metre. That is harder to run on a general-purpose platform than it sounds: stock is a length on a roll rather than a count of boxes, orders come in 0.1 m steps, nearly every product is also sold as a swatch, and a customer who buys five swatches is a lead rather than a sale. Magento can be made to do all of it. What it cannot do is make the daily work quick.

So the daily work moved. Pulse holds its own copy of the catalogue, refreshed nightly and kept current by a queue, and every screen is built for one job rather than for the database. Adding a product is a short form you can fill in on a phone in the studio, dictating the description, with photos and approval as later stages rather than blockers. Counting stock is a photograph of the roll and two buttons: enough, or not enough. Neither screen looks like a CMS, because neither job is a CMS job.

The part that pays for itself is less obvious. Every product carries a completeness score against an agreed standard, ranked by how much that product actually earns — fabric orders weighted above swatch orders, both weighted above views. Staff work down the list, and the list is finite. Elsewhere, a queue finds customers who bought swatches and never ordered metres, drafts the follow-up email with live stock figures in it, and offers talking points for the phone call.

Magento still prices the orders, applies the tax and takes the money. That division is deliberate: the platform stays close to standard, so it can still take a security update on the day one is published, while the people using it get screens built around how the business actually runs.

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