Scaling duty free sales by modernizing online shopping and pre-ordering for a global duty free operator.

Engagement at a glance

Unified e-commerce and inventory platform managing 20,000+ SKUs across duty-free shop floors at airports and ports in India, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. An 11% increase in overall revenue once the platform was operational.
Real-time pricing, inventory, and promotion management, by category, by SKU, and by bundle offer, resolved correctly across multiple currencies at every location
Personalized recommendation engine built on customer demographics, flight routes, and previous purchase history.
Preorder website and mobile app for travelers with a valid ticket and completed web check-in, with expedited pickup at departure, arrival, or in transit.
Connected admin console for operations, orders, returns, promotional campaigns, and customer surveys, with automated stock alerts and promotion go-lives.
Enterprise-grade information security engineered around highly sensitive personal and payment data.

The business context

Duty-free retail runs on a paradox: it depends on impulse and convenience, but it operates through some of the most fragmented, high-pressure retail environments in travel. A global duty-free operator sells across multiple vendors, multiple locations, and multiple currencies, often to a traveler with limited time between a boarding pass and a departure gate.

For this client, that fragmentation had stopped being a background inefficiency and started limiting how the business could grow. Leadership needed more than a better checkout screen at a single counter. They needed visibility across every vendor and location, a way to actually understand who their customers were, and a shopping experience that could compete with the convenience travelers expect everywhere else in their journey.

The challenge

The operator's growth was constrained by four connected problems, not one isolated gap. Fragmented vendor visibility meant leadership had no single platform to track sales, revenue, or inventory across the business. Inconsistent customer experience meant pricing, discounts, and coupons varied depending on where and how a customer shopped, with no central coordination across localities.

Limited customer insight meant the business had no structured data on customer buying preferences by gender, locality, or age group, making it difficult to personalize offers or plan inventory around actual demand. Operational bottlenecks at the point of sale meant long queues at billing counters were directly costing the business sales, as time-constrained travelers abandoned purchases rather than wait. Individually, each problem looked like an operational fix. Together, they represented a business that was leaving revenue on the table at nearly every stage of the customer journey.

The Sundew approach

Sundew worked as the digital technology partner within the client's multi-vendor delivery ecosystem, building a unified platform on Microsoft Azure, with React Native, Power BI, and a Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP foundation, to bring sales, revenue, discounts, and customer data under one system rather than many disconnected ones.

Unified multi-vendor sales platform

Sales, revenue, and discount data from across all vendors were synced into a single, centralized application built on Microsoft Azure, running on a Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP foundation, giving leadership one consolidated view of performance in place of fragmented, vendor-by-vendor reporting.

Centralized inventory and pricing management

The platform gave the business one consistent area to manage product pricing and stock across every outlet and locality, replacing the ad hoc, vendor-by-vendor approach that had previously created an inconsistent customer experience.

Customer buying preference intelligence

Customer behavior data by gender, locality, and age group was captured and structured within the platform, with Power BI serving as the analytics layer that turned this data into a factual basis for personalization and demand planning, rather than assumptions.

Preorder experience platform

A dedicated preorder website, paired with a React Native mobile experience, lets customers browse and purchase in advance, then collect their order at arrival or departure, removing the point-of-sale bottleneck entirely for travelers who preordered.

This combination meant the client wasn't just digitizing an existing counter-based sales model; it was creating an entirely new channel for how customers could shop duty free, ahead of the queue rather than caught inside it.

The outcome

The unified platform gave the client a single, centralized view of sales, revenue, and customer behavior across a previously fragmented multi-vendor network, turning scattered operational data into a foundation the business could actually plan around. Structured visibility into customer buying preferences by gender, locality, and age group gave the business a starting point for more targeted offers and locality-specific promotions, replacing guesswork with data.

Most significantly, the preorder experience gave the operator a new way to capture sales that the traditional counter model was losing, customers no longer had to choose between making a purchase and making their flight. Combined with centralized pricing and coupon management, this gave the client a more consistent, differentiated shopping experience across its duty free channels, contributing to a meaningful lift in sales and revenue.

What this means for your enterprise

If your business runs on a multi-vendor or multi-location model, the real cost is rarely visible in any single vendor's numbers; it's hidden in the gap between them. A duty free counter can look profitable in isolation while the business as a whole is losing sales to queues, missing the customer data to personalize offers, and unable to see performance across vendors in one place.

A unified platform doesn't just centralize reporting. It creates a new channel, like a preorder experience, that a fragmented, counter-only model could never support. The risk isn't investing in that platform. The risk is continuing to measure a fragmented business one vendor at a time.

"The queue was never the problem. The missing platform behind it was."

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Frequently Asked Questions

How does a unified platform help a multi-vendor duty free business?

Instead of each vendor tracking sales, revenue, and inventory separately, the platform, built on Microsoft Azure with a Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP foundation, syncs this data into a single application. This gives leadership one consolidated view of performance across every vendor and location, replacing fragmented, vendor-by-vendor reporting with a centralized picture of the business.
How does the preorder experience work for travelers?

Customers browse and purchase duty free products in advance through a dedicated preorder website or the React Native mobile experience, then collect their order at the airport, either at arrival or departure, without waiting in the traditional billing queue. This gives time-constrained travelers a way to complete a purchase they might otherwise abandon.
What kind of customer data does the platform capture, and why does it matter?

The platform structures customer buying preference data by gender, locality, and age group, with Power BI turning that structured data into dashboards leadership can act on. This gives the business a factual basis for personalizing offers, planning inventory by location, and designing discounts that reflect actual demand patterns rather than assumptions.
How does centralized pricing and discount management improve the customer experience?

Rather than pricing and coupon management varying by vendor or locality in an ad hoc way, the platform manages these centrally, giving customers a more consistent experience regardless of which outlet or vendor they engage with.
What role did Sundew play in this multi-vendor engagement?

Sundew acted as the digital technology partner within the client's multi-vendor delivery ecosystem, building the unified platform on Azure, React Native, Power BI, and a Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP foundation, connecting sales, inventory, pricing, and customer data across vendors, and designing the preorder experience as a new customer-facing channel.
Can this model extend to other retail categories beyond duty free?

The underlying approach, unifying multi-vendor sales data, centralizing pricing, and adding a preorder channel, applies to any high-volume, multi-vendor retail environment where point-of-sale bottlenecks and fragmented data are limiting growth, not only travel retail.