A licensed importer bringing goods from China to the UK, and a growing retro-game parts supplier in its own right, had built a custom ERP and inventory system for warehouse operations and multi-storefront sales on eBay and Amazon, run as a single Python project versioned by hand across desktop folders and deployed via Google Drive – and as the business expanded across warehouses in the UK, Guangzhou, and the Netherlands, wanting to add more storefronts on top of it, “limitations began to emerge around multi-user and remote access, data management, maintainability, and long-term scalability,” made more pressing by two extra factors: the SKU system feeds directly into invoice and receipt printing, so GDPR compliance on that customer data was a live concern well beyond a single jurisdiction, given personal data was already moving between UK, EU, and Chinese warehouses; and fellow business owners had already shown interest in getting their hands on the system, raising options around licensing or productising it.

This was a series of consultancy sessions, not a build engagement: the goal was to understand the existing system end to end, and meet the client at their own technical level, before recommending anything – starting from the fact that it’s the operational backbone of an ecommerce and logistics business, where warehouse operators pick items off shelves, pack them, and print shipping labels and invoices for dispatch, all running off one PC in the warehouse. Mapping the as-is architecture surfaced the real risks – eBay and Amazon both syncing live through that one desktop machine with no easy way to add further storefronts, Google Drive doubling up as both data store and deployment mechanism, a fragile manual link out to local NAS file storage, and personal customer data flowing straight into the invoice/receipt printing pipeline with no compliance safeguards around it, made harder by the fact that data was already crossing borders between the UK, Dutch, and Guangzhou warehouses – and turned up one useful detail that shaped the deployment recommendation: the NAS was already a Synology box capable of running Docker.

Rather than building the next iteration, the engagement focused on establishing a foundation the client could operationalize themselves:

• Proper version control for the codebase, both locally and to a remote repository
• Deployment as a Docker container on the existing Synology NAS instead of running off a desktop
• Moving off Google Drive onto a dedicated database with a single source of truth for inventory and room for further storefronts
• Data handling changes around the invoice/receipt pipeline to put the SKU system’s customer data on a proper GDPR footing
• Event-driven dispatch-worker patterns to decouple the interface from the logistics process itself, so emails and order-state updates fire automatically as operators move each order through pick, pack, and dispatch