How One Retail Group got reports before morning coffee

Meet One Retail Group

One Retail Group is an Amazon aggregator that also sold through Shopify — six brands, across different ecommerce fields, with a team past 100. Marketing, ops, and commercial still answered the same question from a spreadsheet.

The challenge

The file was the bottleneck

There was no data strategy. Reports took hours to prep. Only people with a decent laptop spec could open a file to answer a question. Amazon and Shopify lived in Excel while the business had already outgrown that way of seeing itself.

Not “build some dashboards.” Get the reports the business actually runs on off Excel — and onto machines anyone could open.

The solution

Power BI came in on Shopify and marketing first — enough to prove it got insight to people faster than Excel. That was the point: not a big-bang cutover. Once it was obvious, the rest followed. Paid spend, Amazon regional performance, product contribution, stock movement — pipelines underneath, so the numbers were current before the working day started. I brought Power BI in. I started on the smaller revenue channels because that was the fastest way to show it worked, then pushed the full migration.

• Prove Power BI on Shopify and paid marketing first — the smaller channels, so the room believed it
• Migrate the reports they actually ran: Amazon, product, stock
• ETL and automation so freshness wasn’t someone’s 7am job

Power BI as the reporting layer, with ETL feeding Shopify, Amazon, and paid media (Meta, Google, Bing).

The reports

Paid marketing performanceDid yesterday's spend make money?Product performanceWhich SKUs are actually making money?Amazon forecast & performanceAre we really on plan?Stock movementCan ops act before the buy is late?

The results

• Reports ready before morning coffee
• Prep hours gone from the start of the day
• Answers no longer locked to a high-spec laptop
• Meta, Google and Bing spend in one place
• Amazon regional forecast not averaged away by a quieter market
• Stock movement visible to ops in time to buy, hold, or move

The company could run six brands without Excel as the operating system.

Marketing stopped reconciling. Ops could act. The working day started with the numbers, not with a file.