Nutrition Warehouse is Australia’s largest sports supplement retailer. With over 120 retail locations across Australia and New Zealand, the business faced challenges scaling efficiently while delivering consistent service both online and in-store. But their legacy systems, including Adobe Commerce, previously Magento, for ecommerce and Retail Express for POS, created major barriers to growth.
Frequent downtime, fragmented data, and manual workarounds meant the team was spending more time maintaining systems than innovating. Identifying the need for a flexible and unified platform, Nutrition Warehouse migrated to Shopify and adopted Shopify POS, which together provided the power they needed to unify their tech stack, enhance their loyalty offering, and future-proof their business model.
With Shopify, Nutrition Warehouse has seen:
- 120+ stores onboarded with Shopify POS in 6 months
- 15 minutes to train staff on Shopify POS, compared to full-day training sessions for previous POS system
- 600 staff trained with mobile POS in 3 months
- $100,000+ in incremental event sales from mobile POS setups
- 15% reduction in time spent on data consolidation across online and offline channels
The challenge: A fragmented tech stack stood in the way of scalability
Previously, Nutrition Warehouse ran their ecommerce store on Magento and used Retail Express for their in-store POS in their extensive retail footprint across Australia and New Zealand. However, these systems operated in silos, with imperfect integrations, leading to manual workarounds, data update delays, and poor experiences for staff and customers alike.
Online gift cards couldn't be redeemed in-store without team members making a call to customer service to claim them, inventory updates were delayed by 15-minute batch processes, and customer data was not unified across channels. Sales days regularly caused site crashes, forcing teams to stagger email sends to different customer segments just to avoid downtime. These limitations created internal inefficiencies and undermined the seamless experience customers expected.
Meanwhile, store teams navigated multiple systems to complete basic tasks like checking inventory, price matching, or applying discounts. For instance, store staff could manually override prices to fulfil Nutrition Warehouse’s price match guarantee, but then would have to complete a form to send that information to head office. Due to multiple systems, the price and competitor information did not automatically propagate across the entire network, making it hard for the retailer to spot pricing trends and respond accordingly.
Loyalty and promotional flows were overly complex, and support teams were burdened with manually reconciling data between systems. Ultimately, the lack of a unified platform slowed innovation and prevented the business from scaling smoothly.
Online, Nutrition Warehouse’s previous DTC ecommerce platform was heavily customised and maintained by an in-house development team, which became more of a maintenance function than a driver of innovation. Every update, whether content, features, or integrations, required developer input, and the business spent significant time maintaining links between systems.
Our legacy systems held us back. The POS was clunky, customer data lived in silos, and our team spent more time troubleshooting than serving. Shopify was able to solve these challenges and give us an easier way forward.
The solution: Consolidated commerce, rapid rollout, and retail empowerment
Nutrition Warehouse worked with implementation partner Make Retail to deploy Shopify POS across its store network and unify operations with Shopify's ecommerce platform, which they implemented in 2022.
The rollout expanded with remarkable speed, reaching 121 stores in just six months. The mobile-first design of Shopify POS was familiar and intuitive for staff, helping them be trained up in as little as 30 minutes, compared to a full day on legacy systems, facilitating the rapid rollout.
With Shopify POS and the Shopify platform, Nutrition Warehouse can run loyalty, gift cards, click-and-collect, and promotions all through one connected platform. Information is updated across the unified system immediately, replacing clunky workarounds with streamlined workflows. Shopify Flow enabled the business to automate and power its loyalty program using native store credit, rewarding customers instantly and seamlessly across channels.
Custom POS tiles, created using Checkout Extensibility and Shopify APIs, meant Nutrition Warehouse could implement advanced functions like discounting for defence force employees, staff discounts and real-time price matching directly into the POS interface. These were centrally configured and easily rolled out across all locations.
With Shopify POS, we finally have a unified, flexible system that works at scale. Our team can launch updates from HQ, automate key workflows, and empower staff to deliver a seamless customer experience—without all the manual overhead.
Shop Pay was used to gather customer information that could be used online and in-store for personalised service and streamlined transactions, while native integrations with Klaviyo, Gorgias, and Okendo supported a fully connected customer journey.
Importantly, Shopify’s robust API support has let Nutrition Warehouse maintain integrations with their existing inventory systems — a crucial capability given that each store carries upward of 2,000 SKUs. Real-time syncing reduced stockouts and improved fulfilment accuracy. Staff can now check stock, view customer history, and process sales from anywhere in the store using mobile devices, delivering a smoother, more informed customer experience.
Deploying Shopify POS in 121 stores was only the beginning. With a unified Shopify ecommerce stack, we’ve been able to innovate with automated loyalty, UI extensions for discount controls, and click-and-collect workflows that just work. Together, these capabilities create a more seamless customer experience and a better staff experience, helping to drive sales in-store.
From an online perspective, migrating to Shopify gave Nutrition Warehouse a stable, future-ready foundation that removed the friction of constant development work. The team was able to replace its fully customised, dev-heavy setup with native tools and automation, enabling fast, reliable updates without the overhead.
The result: Unified performance fosters seamless staff and customer experiences
The shift to Shopify has empowered Nutrition Warehouse to consolidate their operations under one scalable platform. The retailer now supports seamless omnichannel experiences, from real-time loyalty redemptions to click-and-collect orders, across all touchpoints, both online and in-store.
Centralising data has given Nutrition Warehouse a single customer view for the first time, with these unified insights helping the business better understand and serve them. With the Shopify platform powering the backend and Shopify POS supporting retail transactions, staff members can use customers’ purchase histories to advise them more effectively in-store.
Staff no longer need to switch between systems or process price overrides manually, enhancing the staff experience and giving them the ability to focus more on engaging with customers rather than managing system workarounds.Now, they can focus more on building relationships and providing expert advice — a key point of differentiation for the brand.
Operationally, onboarding time for new team members has been slashed from one day to just 15 minutes. Event activations like $2 Can Weekends, which previously caused headaches due to fragmented systems, now run smoothly on mobile POS.
The platform has also let Nutrition Warehouse make the most of new revenue streams through event-based selling, with the mobile device-based nature of Shopify POS giving the company the ability to set up quickly with Wi-Fi or a hotspot and run activations at local events. This has contributed over $100,000 in incremental revenue through more agile pop-up setups.
Backend processes have improved dramatically. Promotions and bundles are managed from HQ and pushed out to stores in real-time, streamlining national campaigns and improving execution at scale. Manual reconciliation of sales data is no longer required, freeing up finance and support teams to focus on higher-value tasks, while less time is spent on consolidating data across sales channels.
The developer team, no longer bogged down by maintaining and integrating a patchwork of systems, is now free to focus more on strategic innovation. Most importantly, customers benefit from a smoother, more consistent shopping experience, online and in-store.
The unified platform made possible by Shopify has improved everything from customer experience to finance. The days of reconciling between two systems are over. Shopify lets us focus on delivering better service and growing the business.
Looking ahead, Nutrition Warehouse is planning to consolidate their multi-brand portfolio under Shopify, unifying eight online stores, including Nutrition Warehouse, Supplement Warehouse, and several private labels, into a centralised ecosystem. This transition will enable shared infrastructure, streamlined operations, and more consistent customer experiences across brands.