Peter Jackson

The Challenge

Peter Jackson is a renowned Australian menswear brand, celebrated for its high-quality, fashion-forward suiting and apparel at accessible prices. From its origins as a single tailor shop, the brand has expanded into a national retail chain.

After launching their ecommerce store on Shopline, Peter Jackson encountered persistent integration challenges with their Harmony ERP system. These issues disrupted the customer experience, particularly around inventory accuracy and order management. The limitations of the previous ecommerce platform - such as frequent outages, heavy maintenance requirements, and the need for external developers prompted the brand to seek a more robust, flexible solution.

Key drivers for migration:

• Need for greater platform stability and flexibility
• Desire for a larger developer ecosystem
• Improved native functionality and customisation options
• A user experience overhaul to better reflect the brand’s premium positioning

The Value Delivered:

Migrating to Shopify Plus and working with Aligent delivered significant operational and customer experience improvements:

• Real-time data visibility across all orders, enabling faster and more accurate decision-making
• custom Shopify App for monitoring successful order syncs and retrying failed ones
• Accurate stock availability exposed across all sales channels, reducing overselling and customer disappointment
• Inventory updates as frequently as every 5 minutes, ensuring near real-time accuracy

Harmony to Shopify Inventory Sync

The integration was engineered with two distinct sync processes to balance speed and completeness:
Delta Sync

• Runs every 5 minutes (6 AM – Midnight)
• Monitors Harmony’s to identify recently updated products
• Implements client-specific mapping to match ERP variants with Shopify inventory items
• Processes only products with quantities above zero for performance optimisation
• Includes collision detection to prevent overlapping executions during high-volume periods
• Track sync progress using cloud database technology

Full Sync

• Runs daily at 4 AM
• Performs a comprehensive reconciliation across all products and warehouse locations
• Handles zero-quantity products that the Delta sync excludes
• Refreshes the entire Shopify product dataset and stores it for mapping reference
• Processes all 80+ warehouse/store locations to maintain complete inventory accuracy
• Resets Delta sync baseline to prevent data drift

Performance:

• Delta sync: 25 SKUs in 2.5 minutes
• Full sync: 585 SKUs in 45 minutes

Overcoming Harmony ERP Challenges

• No webhook for inventory-only updates: Used intelligent filters, but this returned all product updates, not just inventory changes.
• API call limitations: Only 10 warehouses could be requested per call.
• Unreliable parent-to-variant mapping: Required custom logic to ensure accurate variant-level inventory.
• SKU mapping issues: Inventory data by SKU could not be directly mapped to Shopify variants, necessitating barcode-based requests

Technical Architecture Highlights

• Smart Data Transformation: Converts Harmony’s warehouse-centric inventory to Shopify’s location-based structure
• API Optimisation: Batches updates into 250-item chunks to respect Shopify’s GraphQL limits to avoid API throttling.
• Configurable Business Rules: Handles negative inventory based on merchant preferences, with options to send negative or zero values to Shopify

Peter Jackson’s migration to Shopify Plus, with a custom-engineered Harmony ERP integration, has delivered real-time inventory visibility, improved operational efficiency, and a premium customer experience. The project’s success was underpinned by a clear technical strategy, robust data transformation, and a focus on business outcomes - positioning the brand for continued growth in a competitive retail landscape