01 · Build
What we built
A wargames shop selling thousands of products online, and a bespoke till behind the counter that sells from the same stock.
Retail · Daventry
Battlefield Hobbies
A wargames shop selling thousands of products online, and a bespoke till behind the counter that sells from the same stock.
The story
Where they started
A hobby shop lives on new releases. Every week brings new lines, pre-orders and events, and all of it has to land on the site fast and be found by people searching for it. The shop needed an online store that could keep up with the counter.
What we built
A WooCommerce store with a catalogue in the thousands, event pages for the gaming venue, and a layer of search work underneath so that products, the shop and the events are described properly to Google and to the AI assistants people now ask instead. The hosting and the month-to-month care are ours.
The till
The online shop was working well. The counter was the problem. Off-the-shelf tills either knew nothing about the website’s stock or wanted the shop to run its whole business their way, and two stock counts for one shop only ever go one direction.
So we built one. The old till was a plugin inside the website, and it had reached the limit of what it could handle. The new one is an application in its own right, running in a browser on a tablet behind the counter, made for this shop and nobody else. All 10,000-plus products are held on the tablet, so a search at the counter answers straight away. Everyday extras like table fees, drinks and event bookings sit one tap from the home screen. Every product shows its stock at a glance, including lines that exist only in the shop. If the internet drops, the counter keeps selling and the orders go through to the website when it’s back. If an order ever fails to reach the website, it’s kept safe, we get an email about it, and staff can resend it from the till. One stock count, and nothing lost between the counter and the shop.
The rules that mattered were the boring ones: what happens mid-sale when the connection drops, who can refund what, and how a counter sale shows up in the online orders. Those took the care.
What’s next
The till is live and in daily use behind the counter. What gets added next comes from the counter, not from us, which is how bespoke software should be run.
Live atbattlefieldhobbies.co.uk
How it runs now
An ordinary month
02 · Manage
What we look after
Keep the shop fast and the checkout working, keep the catalogue and events discoverable in search, and keep the till and the website agreeing about stock.
03 · Grow
How we help it grow
Events, pre-orders and new ranges kept discoverable in search, and the till grows whenever the counter asks it to.
Yours could be next
No obligation, no jargon, no pressure
Tell us what you’re trying to do. We’ll tell you where to start.
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