INDUSTRIES / RETAIL & E-COMMERCE
Retail & E-commerce, transformed with intent.
We build the intelligence layer for modern retail: forecasting that cuts stockouts and markdowns, personalization that lifts conversion, and commerce platforms that survive Black Friday.
OVERVIEW
How we work in retail & e-commerce
Retail margins live and die on prediction: how much to buy, where to put it, what to charge, and what to show each customer. Ilmora's retail practice has delivered AI and platform engineering for grocery chains, fashion brands, marketplaces, and DTC companies processing everything from 200 orders a day to 2 million — always tying models directly to the merchandising and supply-chain decisions they inform.
We are equally strong on the platform side. Composable commerce architectures, sub-second search, headless storefronts, and order-management systems that keep promise dates honest across stores, warehouses, and drop-ship partners. When the model says what to do and the platform can't execute it, nothing improves — so we build both.
Measured outcomes
- reduction in stockouts at a 400-store grocery chain
- 28%
- reduction in stockouts at a 400-store grocery chain
- conversion-rate lift from personalized product ranking
- 19%
- conversion-rate lift from personalized product ranking
- gross-margin improvement from markdown optimization
- 3.4pt
- gross-margin improvement from markdown optimization
- storefront uptime through peak trading after replatform
- 99.98%
- storefront uptime through peak trading after replatform
THE CHALLENGES
What's standing in the way
The problems we hear most often from retail & e-commerce leaders — and the ones our engagements are scoped to solve.
Stockouts and overstock at the same time
Forecasting at category level hides SKU/store-level errors: bestsellers go out of stock while slow movers pile up and end in markdown.
Generic customer experiences
One-size-fits-all merchandising and email blasts underperform while customer-acquisition costs keep climbing, making retention economics decisive.
Margin pressure and pricing complexity
Promo-heavy calendars and competitor price moves demand daily pricing decisions no spreadsheet team can keep up with.
Fragmented commerce stack
Legacy e-commerce monoliths, separate POS, OMS, and loyalty systems produce inconsistent inventory, pricing, and customer views across channels.
OUR SOLUTION
From constraint to capability
Our retail AI starts with a customer-and-inventory data foundation: identity-resolved customer profiles and a real-time inventory ledger across channels. On that base we deploy SKU/store-level demand forecasting that feeds replenishment and allocation directly, personalization models for on-site ranking, recommendations, and lifecycle marketing, and pricing engines that optimize markdown and promo decisions within your margin and brand rules.
Where the platform is the constraint, we modernize it: composable commerce with headless storefronts, event-driven order management for accurate available-to-promise across channels, and search infrastructure combining vector and keyword retrieval so customers find products even when they can't spell them. Everything is load-tested against your peak, not your average.
Demand forecasting & replenishment
SKU/store-level probabilistic forecasts feeding automated replenishment, allocation, and buy planning.
Personalization & recommendations
Real-time ranking, cross-sell/upsell models, and lifecycle-marketing propensity scores on identity-resolved profiles.
Pricing & markdown optimization
Elasticity-aware price and promo engines that maximize margin within brand and legal guardrails.
Composable commerce engineering
Headless storefronts, MACH-architecture migrations, and API layers over legacy commerce platforms.
Order management & fulfillment
Event-driven OMS, distributed available-to-promise, and intelligent order routing across stores and DCs.
Product discovery & search
Hybrid vector/keyword search, semantic filtering, and AI shopping assistants grounded in your catalog.
TECHNOLOGY
The stack behind the solutions
Representative platforms and frameworks we deploy in this sector — always selected to fit your estate, not a vendor agenda.
AI / ML
- PyTorch
- LightGBM
- Vertex AI
- Feature stores (Feast)
- OpenSearch / vector search
- LangGraph
Commerce
- commercetools
- Shopify Plus
- Next.js storefronts
- Kafka
- Temporal
- Algolia
Data & Cloud
- Snowflake
- BigQuery
- dbt
- Segment/CDP integration
- Airflow
- Kubernetes
HOW WE DELIVER
A process built for regulated reality
Five phases, each with a concrete artifact and a go/no-go decision — so you always know where the engagement stands.
- 01
Value diagnostic
Quantify stockout, markdown, and conversion losses; baseline forecast accuracy and current stack constraints.
- 02
Data foundation
Resolve customer identity and unify inventory, transaction, and product data into a governed platform.
- 03
Model build & backtest
Develop forecasting or personalization models and prove lift against historical holdouts before touching production.
- 04
Live A/B rollout
Ship behind experiments — a region, a category, a traffic split — and measure revenue and margin impact honestly.
- 05
Scale & operationalize
Expand coverage, automate retraining, and hand merchandising and marketing teams the controls.
USE CASES
Where clients start
Proven entry points with clear ROI — most engagements begin with one of these and expand from evidence.
SKU/store replenishment automation
Probabilistic forecasts driving daily order proposals that buyers approve by exception.
On-site personalization
Session-aware ranking of product listings, search results, and recommendations, tested for real conversion lift.
Markdown optimization
End-of-season markdown ladders optimized per SKU and location to clear inventory at maximum recovered margin.
Unified commerce replatform
Headless storefront and event-driven OMS replacing a monolith, with zero-downtime migration.
FAQS
Questions we hear from leaders
Direct answers to the questions that come up in the first conversation.
RELATED SERVICES
Services behind these solutions
Ready to move the numbers in retail & e-commerce?
Bring us your hardest operational problem. In a 45-minute consultation, our practice leads will map the highest-ROI starting point and a realistic delivery plan.