One team running the whole operation, a year and counting
Two countries, two storefronts, a wholesale dealer program, an ERP, and the season tariffs nearly closed the US market: what running commerce end to end actually looks like
This client is a multi-channel outdoor and off-grid retailer selling into Canada and the United States, direct and through dealers, with physical retail alongside the online business. Most agencies would have been handed one slice of this: the ads, or the storefront, or the integration. We run the whole thing. Both storefronts, the wholesale portal, the ERP pipeline that moves orders to fulfillment, shipping, tax, attribution, and the paid media on top, one team, one plan, for over a year and counting. This is the study to read if what you need is not a project but an operator.
Services
- Managed Shopify operations across Canadian and US storefronts
- B2B wholesale dealer program on SparkLayer
- Syspro ERP integration via Codeless Platforms
- Shipping automation via Freightcom
- Multi-currency setup with country-specific banking and Avalara tax
- Google Ads brought in-house from an outside vendor and run direct
- Northbeam attribution
- HubSpot service desk operations
- Cross-border SEO across the brand's properties
- Peak-season paid media planning and scale-up
- New retail location launch support
Tech Stack
The Challenge
A multi-brand retailer selling direct, wholesale, and in-store across two countries accumulates vendors the way a hull accumulates barnacles: an agency for ads, a freelancer for the theme, an integrator for the ERP, a consultant for tax. Every vendor optimizes their slice, nobody owns the interactions between the slices, and the founder becomes the integration layer, which is the most expensive job in the company done by the person with the least time for it.
Then the interactions started to bite. Wholesale needed a real dealer portal, not email order forms. Orders needed to reach the ERP without being retyped. The US side of the business, a meaningful share of revenue, ran into a tariff environment that threatened to close the market entirely, which is not a problem any single-discipline vendor is equipped to even think about, because the answer spans pricing, duties, logistics, and marketing at once.
What the business needed was not another specialist. It was one team accountable for the whole machine, storefronts to warehouse to ad account, with the standing context to make cross-cutting calls quickly.
The Solution
We took over the operation end to end and have run it as a standing engagement ever since: one roadmap across storefronts, wholesale, integration, logistics, and acquisition, re-planned as conditions change, which in cross-border retail is constantly.
Two storefronts, one operating picture
The Canadian and US stores run as one operation with country-specific banking, multi-currency settlement, and Avalara handling tax across the border. Pricing, promotions, and catalog changes ship to both sides from one plan rather than being maintained twice, and the reporting rolls up so the owner sees one business, not two dashboards.
Wholesale moved off email and onto a dealer portal
The dealer program runs on SparkLayer over the same Shopify catalog that serves retail: dealer pricing, ordering, and account management in a portal instead of an inbox. Wholesale stopped being a parallel manual business and became a channel of the same machine, with the same inventory truth.
Orders flow to the ERP without a human retyping them
Syspro is wired to Shopify through Codeless Platforms, so orders, inventory, and fulfillment state move between systems automatically. Freightcom handles the shipping layer. The operational win is quiet and structural: the pipeline that used to depend on someone keying orders in now runs on its own, and exceptions surface as alerts instead of discoveries.
The tariff season
When tariff changes threatened the US market, the response cut across everything at once: landed-cost and pricing strategy, duty handling, logistics routing, and how the US storefront communicated all of it to buyers. Because one team held all of those levers, the plan was made and executed in days rather than negotiated across four vendors. The US market stayed open and trading. This single episode is most of the argument for the operating model.
Paid media brought in-house and pointed at the same plan
Google Ads management was consolidated from an outside vendor into the same team running the store, with Northbeam providing attribution across channels. Campaign decisions now share context with inventory, margins, and the wholesale calendar, and peak seasons are planned as one commercial event across ads, storefront, and stock rather than a media plan bolted onto a shop.
The account keeps compounding
Because the engagement is standing rather than a project, the work keeps extending where the business goes next: a new retail location supported through launch, the service desk running on HubSpot, and cross-border SEO built up across the brand's properties. The point of the model is that nothing new starts from zero, because the team already holds the context.
The Results
The consent tier on this account lets us tell the story but not publish its performance figures, so the numbers above are the shape of the engagement rather than its results, and we would rather show you that than invent something. What we can say plainly: the US market that tariffs nearly closed is open and trading, wholesale runs through a portal instead of an inbox, orders reach the ERP untouched by hand, and the account has renewed continuously for over a year, which is the metric an agency can least fake. If your operation looks like this client's did, a founder acting as the integration layer between vendors, this is the model built for you.
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