Distribution / Wholesale
Replacing Airtable With a Procurement and Warehouse App
A multi-store retailer ran procurement in Google Sheets, tasks in Airtable, and its warehouse in a WMS that was slow to change. We built a procurement and task app on top of the existing systems. The whole warehouse now runs on it, with 1,300 tasks completed. This engagement is active.
Client
A multi-store specialty retailer with its own warehouse, selling through Shopify, with a product, design and marketing team alongside warehouse staff. Some products carry expiry dates, and pre-orders can have twenty or more customers waiting. Anonymized, active engagement, built jointly with a development partner.
Stack
The problem
The stated goal was to replace the warehouse management system. The real problem was that the operating layer had spread across four places that did not talk to each other. Procurement was run in Google Sheets even though purchase orders were supposed to live in Airtable. Design and marketing work was coordinated by colouring a cell green, which alerted everyone, who then hunted for the file in Drive, uploaded it, and marked it complete in a second sheet. Automations built in the Airtable interface were opaque and slow to change. The WMS put-away webhooks did not fire, its API had no transfer endpoint, and an order-to-warehouse workflow broke on any transfer of more than a hundred items because of a payload size limit.
What we built
A procurement and task application on a Xano backend with a web front end, built around the systems already in place rather than replacing them all at once. Purchase orders were modelled as distinct records per state, with advance shipping notices restructured as child events of a master order, an activity history panel, and a flag that raises a Slack alert when a record fails to sync. A task module gives the warehouse locations, batches and Slack alerts, and writes cycle-count and replenishment tasks back to the WMS. Lot tracking and first-expired-first-out handling were added for the products that carry expiry dates, and put-away is blocked for pre-order products with twenty or more customers waiting. Role-based access controls cover per-module and per-location permissions, and a warehouse-formatted CSV export was added specifically so procurement could stop working in Google Sheets.
What changed
The whole warehouse moved onto the task tool, with 1,300 tasks completed in the app as reported in late August. A shadow test of procurement purchase orders against the existing workflow checked out. The team reports that the biggest difference is not any single feature but the speed of change: bugs and requests turn around in days rather than the long waits they were used to, so warehouse staff started treating the tool as theirs. Store staff were scheduled to start using it in mid-September 2026, and the receiving module, with a tablet view for staff and a desktop view for supervisors, is the next phase.
The takeaway
The plan that gets written in month one is rarely the plan that ships. The Airtable migration was deliberately de-prioritised because the interim workaround was good enough, and the effort moved to the parts of the day that were actually painful. That only works when the person building sits close enough to the work to notice, which is the difference between a scoped project and an embedded one.
“the entire warehouse has been using the task tool to great effect, I'd say.”
Related guides
Shopify Multi-Location Inventory Sync: Stop Overselling
Stop overselling across Shopify locations. Build a real-time multi-location inventory sync system with free n8n templates, GraphQL examples, and reconciliation.
How to Automate Slack Alerts for Airtable Updates Using Make.com
Step-by-step guide to building Make.com scenarios that watch Airtable for changes and push formatted Slack notifications automatically.
How to Build an AI-Powered Review Monitoring and Response System
A technical guide to building an automated review monitoring system with AI sentiment analysis and auto-responses across Google, Trustpilot, and Shopify.
How to Audit Your Ecommerce Operations for Automation Opportunities
A step-by-step framework to audit your ecommerce operations, score automation opportunities by ROI, and build a prioritized automation roadmap.
More case studies
Construction / Building Materials
Reconciling a $60M Construction Sales Pipeline Into One View
Ecommerce / Shopify
Shopify Store Audit Case Study: AI Agents Found $190K in 6 Minutes
Property Development
How a Property Developer Cut Deal Sourcing Time in Half Without an AI Agent
Ecommerce Automation
Make to n8n Migration Case Study: $4,320 a Year Saved
Construction / Manufacturing
Running the Ops Stack for a Brick-Cladding Manufacturer
Property Development