When the Shop Grows and the Spreadsheet Doesn't

There’s a point in a growing shop where the website stops being the problem.

Orders come in from your own site, from Amazon, from eBay, maybe from a trade account. The stock lives in a spreadsheet, or three, and you keep them honest by hand. At the month end the accounts take a little longer to tie than they did the month before.

Nothing’s broken. The business grew and the tools it started on didn’t.

That’s the work I’ve built crossdock.co.uk for.

It’s a second practice, separate from this one, for merchants whose growth has outrun the back office. I built it around the 4 things that outgrow a small setup together: Shopify Plus and the move onto it, stock control, selling on several channels from one pool of stock, and the link that makes Xero or Sage agree with what the shop sold.

Why it has its own site

This newsletter and webuildstores are me talking to you across a table. Crossdock is written for an operations director weighing up a five-figure migration, and that reader wants a different kind of page: system diagrams, a reference library, the tooling named, and the company’s standing set out where they can check it.

The name comes from the warehouse. Cross-docking is moving goods straight from the vehicle that brought them in to the one taking them out, without putting them on a shelf in between. Nothing sits still in the middle, and I’d like the same to be true of the systems I connect.

It tells you what I’d tell you about Shopify Plus: it pays for some businesses and not for others, and each page says which. I drew the same line for trade pricing in when you actually need Plus.

Where it starts

Every engagement starts with a systems review. It’s 7 questions about how you sell, where the stock lives, what’s running now and what has to be true in 18 months.

I read the answers and come back with the systems the business should be running. That includes where Plus earns its fee, and where it doesn’t.

Start the systems review

If it isn’t you yet

If your business isn’t there, nothing about how I work with you changes. If you’ve only just started selling on Amazon alongside your own site, my guide to multi-channel selling is the place to start. But you’ll know someone whose business has grown past its systems: a supplier, a customer, or the shop down the road that’s suddenly posting orders to half the country.

Send them to crossdock.co.uk. I’d rather meet them through you than through a search result.