Unified Commerce Intelligence for a Multi-Format Retailer

The retailer operated three separate technology stacks for three store formats, plus a fourth for e-commerce. Customer data was fragmented across systems, making unified loyalty and personalization impossible. Demand planning ran on Excel-based models at the category level, leading to 18% stockout rates in fast-moving categories and 22% overstocking in seasonal items. Each format had its own pricing rules, promotion calendars, and vendor negotiation workflows -- none connected. Previous attempts at a unified commerce platform by two large IT vendors had stalled after 14 months with no production deployment.

Kaara took a fundamentally different approach, starting with the business outcome: reduce lost sales from stockouts by 40% within 6 months. Using Kaara.Code, the team first encoded the retailer's specific merchandising taxonomy, pricing hierarchies, vendor terms, and promotion rules into the Enterprise Memory Layer. Rather than replacing existing systems, Kaara built an intelligence layer that sat across all four platforms, unifying customer signals and inventory data without requiring a full platform migration. The demand forecasting engine used store-cluster-specific models that accounted for local demographics, festival calendars, and competitive proximity. By the second phase (e-commerce personalization), the entire merchandising knowledge base was already available, cutting development time by 60%.