EPOS, inventory, and omnichannel for UK retailers — chains, independents, and everything between.
Engagement
Compliance posture
What you get
You bring the retail expertise. We bring the engineering — EPOS-fluent, compliance-baked, and built for peak season.
Square, Shopify, and custom till systems wired into your back office — payments, receipts, and reconciliation in one loop.
Real-time stock counts across warehouses, stockrooms, and shop floors — with reorder alerts before you run out.
Purchase patterns, basket analysis, and loyalty insights that help you stock what actually sells.
Click-and-collect, ship-from-store, and returns management that keeps online and offline in sync.
How we work
Four phases, same rhythm every engagement. Card-data scope and EPOS integration feasibility mapped in discovery so there are no mid-build surprises.
Map your sales channels, stock flows, and compliance touchpoints. Card-data scope minimised by design from the discovery stage.
Architecture diagrams, EPOS integration specs, and clickable prototypes — reviewed with your operations team.
Agile delivery with retail-context testing. Card flows handled via Stripe / Square hosted fields, data encrypted at rest, audit logs throughout.
Go-live with staff training, handover docs, and a 30-day window where fixes are free while you settle in.
Compliance map
Six frameworks we design against on every retail engagement — with specifics, not hand-waving.
Card flows go through Stripe or Square hosted payment fields, so cardholder data does not transit Byte Bridges-built systems. SAQ A scope is the default. See our Controls Map for the full position on payment processing.
Refund, returns, and digital-content rights baked into order workflows — not patched in after a customer complaint.
Lawful basis for loyalty data, marketing consent, and customer profiling handled as architecture decisions — not a checkbox exercise.
Subscription traps, drip pricing, and fake-review prohibitions considered in any customer-facing commerce flow.
For online and click-and-collect channels: cancellation rights, pre-contract information, and delivery timelines built into the checkout journey.
Customer-facing storefronts and self-service kiosks built to WCAG 2.1 AA, with the WCAG 2.2 success criteria in flight — because 20% of UK shoppers have a disability.
Proof of work
Our own retail product — built with the same standards we use for client work.
Byte Bridges — internal product
Our own multi-location inventory management platform for independent retailers. Real-time stock tracking, EPOS integration, and automated reorder alerts — built on the same stack we use for client work.
Before you ask
It depends on what you're running. Square and Shopify POS have well-documented APIs — we can sync transactions, inventory, and customer data in near-real-time. Older or proprietary EPOS systems sometimes require file-based exports or middleware. We assess feasibility in discovery before quoting, and we'll tell you honestly if a till swap would be cheaper than an integration.
Shopify is excellent for straightforward e-commerce with a physical presence. If your requirements fit inside Shopify's model — standard products, standard checkout, standard fulfilment — use Shopify and save your budget. We build a custom storefront when Shopify can't handle your workflow: complex pricing rules, multi-warehouse routing, B2B trade accounts, or integrations with systems Shopify doesn't support natively.
We use event-driven architecture — stock movements (sales, transfers, deliveries, returns) publish events that update a central inventory ledger in near-real-time. Each location sees accurate counts without polling. For retailers with unreliable connectivity, we build offline-first with conflict resolution on reconnect.
Tokenisation via Stripe or Square significantly reduces your card-handling scope — you never touch raw card data, so you sit at SAQ A or SAQ A-EP rather than SAQ D. We scope this in discovery, document the cardholder data environment, and make sure your architecture keeps you in the lightest SAQ bracket possible. We do not perform QSA audits ourselves — we make sure your architecture is set up for one.
Yes, but we don't just say "it scales" and hope for the best. We load-test against your projected peak volumes, set up auto-scaling with sensible cost caps, and run a pre-peak checklist covering caching, database connection pooling, and CDN warm-up. If your peak is 50x your normal traffic, we design for that from the start — not as a last-minute panic.
Tell us what you're selling — we'll reply within 24 hours on working days with an honest read on platform choice, EPOS feasibility, and a realistic timeline.
