100,000+ SKUs, 300 Orders/Day, and Source Code Access

The Challenge

Over 100 custom programs had accumulated over the years — each one built to solve a specific problem at a specific moment in the business’s history. Together they formed a system that worked, but only because the people who built it were still there to run it. Add a new marketplace? Build a new program. Change a carrier? Modify several programs that touched shipping. Onboard a new vendor? Find which programs handled vendor logic and update them.

The institutional knowledge problem was acute. No single person in the organization understood the full stack. Losing a developer didn’t just mean losing a team member — it potentially meant losing the understanding of critical operational logic that existed only in code and in memory.

Marketplace-specific kit complexity was a recurring challenge. Automotive parts are frequently sold in bundles that vary by channel: a kit that sells as a single listing on one marketplace might need to be decomposed into individual components for fulfillment, or re-bundled differently for a different channel. The custom programs handling this logic were channel-specific, brittle, and required developer intervention for any change.

ShipStation handled shipping and Revolution Parts handled some marketplace connectivity, but neither integrated cleanly with the custom programs. The stack had grown organically and didn’t have a coherent architecture.

The 40,000 square foot warehouse was operating without a real WMS. Receiving, putaway, and picking were managed through a combination of custom programs and manual processes that didn’t give warehouse staff systematic direction.

Why SkuNexus

The owner evaluated the decision the way a developer evaluates software: what’s the architecture, what does the API look like, what can I actually control? Source code access was a non-negotiable requirement. A platform that provided less control than the custom programs being replaced wasn’t a meaningful upgrade.

SkuNexus’s API-first architecture and full source code access met that requirement. The three-person dev team can build custom integrations against the SkuNexus API, extend the platform to handle the marketplace-specific kit decomposition logic that the automotive parts business requires, and maintain that code as part of a documented, coherent system rather than as one more custom program added to a growing pile.

The WMS capabilities — directed receiving, putaway, wave picking, barcode scanning — addressed the warehouse operations gap directly. For a 40,000 square foot warehouse processing 300 orders per day, systematic WMS direction is not optional.

Vendor management and automated PO generation consolidated the vendor coordination that had been distributed across multiple custom programs. The automotive parts wholesale model depends heavily on vendor relationships — centralizing that management in a single platform was operationally meaningful.

What Was Built

API-First Custom Integration Architecture

The development team built their channel integrations and marketplace-specific logic against the SkuNexus API rather than maintaining standalone custom programs. The integrations live in a coherent codebase that other developers can understand, modify, and maintain. New channels add to the existing integration framework instead of spawning new isolated programs.

Marketplace-Specific Kit Decomposition

Automotive parts bundle configurations vary by marketplace. SkuNexus handles the kit decomposition logic that determines how a bundle listing should be fulfilled — which components are picked, which are ordered from vendors, which are substituted when the primary component is out of stock. That logic is configured in the platform and maintained through the API rather than in separate custom programs per marketplace.

40,000 Sq Ft WMS Onboarding

The warehouse was mapped into SkuNexus with location structure, bin assignments, and receiving zones defined for the full 40,000 square foot footprint. Directed receiving assigns putaway locations automatically. Wave picking organizes picks by zone to minimize travel distance. Barcode scanning verifies transactions at every step.

Vendor Management and PO Automation

The vendor network — dozens of automotive parts suppliers — connects to SkuNexus through the vendor management module. Purchase orders generate automatically when inventory drops below reorder points or when dropship orders require vendor fulfillment. Vendor confirmations and tracking updates flow back through the system automatically.

The Results

More than 100 custom programs are being consolidated into a single platform with a coherent API and accessible source code. The institutional knowledge that was previously siloed in individual developers is being transferred into a documented system that the entire team can work with.

The bus factor risk that comes with custom programs known only to their authors decreases as operations migrate to SkuNexus. When a developer leaves or is unavailable, the system runs on platform architecture rather than on memory.

The warehouse operates with WMS direction for the first time — receiving, putaway, picking, and shipping are all systematic rather than individually managed. For a 40,000 square foot facility processing 300 orders per day, the efficiency gains from directed picking alone are operationally significant.

Marketplace kit complexity is managed through the platform rather than through brittle custom code. Adding a new channel or changing bundle configurations is a configuration task rather than a development project.