Every channel your e-tail business adds brings more data, more system handoffs, and more manual reconciliation work to keep the numbers synced across them all.
Your Shopify store, Amazon store, and social commerce channels each manage their own inventory, orders, and payments. That data stays inside each platform, separate from the others. The same is true for your internal tools and spreadsheets: inventory lives in one system, orders in another, customer data in a third, finance in a fourth.
Your operations team pulls numbers from each platform into spreadsheets to piece together what's happening across the business. Not only does that take a lot of time, it also risks mistakes creeping in because someone accidentally pressed paste twice or deleted a cell. Decisions get made on numbers that may be out of date. The results may vary, but the root cause is the same: there’s no single accurate view of what’s happening across the business.
There is a solution: custom apps that replace manual workflows and disconnected spreadsheets with accurate, real-time operational data.
GlideOS is an AI software development platform for building internal business tools from a spreadsheet, a prompt, or a file. Connect your existing data to GlideOS and describe what you want to build. It generates working apps customized to your business, whether that’s a mobile app for warehouse staff, an office app for finance or customer service teams, or leadership dashboards showing how your entire operation is performing.
The apps in this guide are examples of what’s possible with GlideOS. Rather than forcing every team into the same software, GlideOS lets you build purpose-built apps for each workflow while keeping every app connected to the same underlying data.
Here’s how custom e-tail apps can help your team stay aligned across every function and give you a consolidated view of how your business is performing across every sales channel.
Why build custom e-tail apps in GlideOS?
GlideOS replaces the spreadsheets and disconnected tools holding your online retail operation together with connected apps that run on live data.
- Flexible: GlideOS is more adaptable than off-the-shelf software and builds apps around how your operation actually works. If your fulfillment process has a step no standard tool accounts for, you add it. If the warehouse team needs fields a generic template leaves out, you build them in.
- Fast to build: Building custom apps in GlideOS takes days or weeks instead of months. There’s no lengthy development cycle and no need to hire engineers. You can describe what you want, and GlideOS will build it for you.
- Mobile accessible: Every GlideOS app works on desktop and mobile. Warehouse teams can scan shipments from a phone just as easily as leadership can monitor live dashboards while travelling. You describe the app once, and GlideOS automatically builds it for every device.
- Connect to all your data: Connect the spreadsheets and software you already use, or store new data directly in GlideOS. When information changes in one app, every connected app reflects the update automatically. Every team gets the same accurate, real-time information.
- Multiple apps: Your data powers multiple apps for different teams, purposes, and access levels. Your warehouse team sees incoming returns to inspect and process, finance sees return costs by channel to reconcile, and leadership tracks return rates by product, channel, or carrier. Each team gets the information they need without maintaining separate copies of the same data.
- Easy to scale: Adding a new sales channel means connecting it to GlideOS. Your existing operations continue, and the new channel quickly gets integrated into your team's workflows.
- Secure: All your GlideOS apps run on enterprise-grade infrastructure with SOC 2 Type 1 certification, GDPR and CCPA compliance, and AES-256 encryption. Sensitive business and customer data is protected by default.
Benefits of GlideOS apps for your e-tail business
Replacing disconnected spreadsheets and tools with custom apps closes the operational gaps that slow down your e-commerce business. Instead of relying on local spreadsheet copies or paper logs in the warehouse, every team works from the same live data that’s easy to access, read, and update.
- Real-time visibility: When teams are no longer pulling data manually from multiple platforms, they can do the work faster and without errors. There are no version control issues that come with spreadsheets or wondering whether the data is today’s or last week’s. You get a live, accurate view of how your e-commerce business is performing across every sales channel.
- Single source of truth: Every GlideOS app you build uses the same underlying data. Update an inventory record or customer order once, and the change appears across every connected app. Your team is aligned on the current stock levels, returns, promotions, and any order information they need to do their jobs, without chasing spreadsheets or wondering which version is current.
- Automated workflows: GlideOS is an AI software platform, and it has AI and automations built directly into the app. You can create workflows so that tasks that currently take significant staff time, like writing product descriptions for each sales channel or logging and shelving returns, run automatically.
- Visual data display: GlideOS apps display and store images, video, PDFs, and audio files alongside the operational data. For a warehouse team receiving returns, images of the product’s condition can be attached to the return record at inspection, taken on the mobile app. Customer service can access the images in the records and answer customer queries about refunds with evidence. Your team doesn’t need to zoom and scroll to read individual spreadsheet cells on a mobile phone.
- Live dashboards: You can build charts directly into the app to create dashboards that update in real-time. Visualize and monitor order volume by channel, return rates by product, carrier SLA performance, marketing campaign performance, or any other metrics you’re tracking in GlideOS. When you pull up a dashboard, the figures are always current.
Supply chain and fulfillment
Supply chain data for an e-tail business is scattered across each sales channel’s backend, supplier portals, carrier systems, warehouse logs, and spreadsheets. Custom GlideOS apps bring that data together so the supply chain and fulfillment process work with accurate, real-time information.
1. Inventory manager
A custom inventory manager app gives every part of the operation one accurate count of what’s in stock, no matter which sales channel the last order came from.
The app brings all your inventory data into one place and displays SKUs, stock value, low-stock and out-of-stock items, 30-day transaction volume, and open purchase orders. It connects to all your sales platforms, so every sale updates the live inventory count in the app and across every other connected sales channel automatically. This removes the lag between sales and inventory updates that comes from managing stock across spreadsheets and disconnected systems.
AI features inside the app help your team make better inventory decisions. GlideOS’s inventory manager app includes an AI Reorder Plan that analyzes current stock levels, reorder points, 30-day sales velocity, outstanding purchase orders, supplier preferences, and lead times to recommend what to reorder, from which supplier, and in what quantities. It also flags orders that can be combined to reduce freight costs and estimates the total order value.
With real-time inventory data and AI-powered recommendations, your team can keep inventory aligned across every sales channel, reduce stockouts, and avoid missed sales.
2. Channel allocation app
A channel allocation app brings together your inventory data, allocation rules, and marketplace SLAs to recommend when inventory should be reallocated between sales channels.
The app generates recommendations based on the allocation rules you define, such as maintaining minimum stock levels to meet marketplace SLAs, reserving inventory for promotions, or maintaining a minimum number of days of cover. It tracks sell-through rate, days of cover, and how close each channel is to its minimum allocation or a stockout.
AI builds on these rules by recommending how inventory should be redistributed based on current sales velocity, demand patterns, and stock levels across channels. Instead of simply following fixed thresholds, it identifies where inventory is most likely to sell and recommends reallocations for your team to review.
When a channel falls outside your rules, or AI identifies a different allocation, the app recommends a reallocation for your team to review before any inventory moves. It shows what changed, why it made the recommendation, and the impact of acting on it. Your team makes the final decision.
With live inventory data and AI-assisted recommendations, your team can keep the right amount of stock allocated to each sales channel and reduce the risk of products showing as out of stock.
3. Fulfillment tracking app
A fulfillment tracking app gives your team one view of every order across every sales channel and fulfillment provider, helping you catch delays before they become late deliveries or marketplace SLA violations.
The app pulls order and shipment data from your warehouses, fulfillment providers, and carriers into one place. It shows whether an order is waiting to be picked, packed, in transit, or delivered, while tracking ship-by and delivery deadlines. Orders at risk of missing a delivery date or SLA are flagged immediately, allowing your team to prioritize packing, investigate delays, or reroute shipments before they become customer issues.
The app also tracks metrics such as on-time shipment rate, cancellation rate, return rate, and return processing times. AI analyzes those trends over time to identify the underlying cause. For example, it might detect that on-time shipment rates have declined over the past three weeks and trace the issue to a single fulfillment provider rather than your operation as a whole.
Whether you’re shipping through your own warehouse or selling on a marketplace, consistent fulfillment performance affects customer satisfaction and future sales. For marketplace orders, it also affects your standing with the platform, where repeated SLA failures can reduce product visibility, restrict selling privileges, or even put your account at risk of termination.
By identifying problems early and showing where they’re coming from, a fulfillment tracking app helps your team resolve issues before they affect customers or business performance.
4. Carrier performance app
A carrier performance app tracks how well each carrier meets its delivery and package quality commitments, giving your team the data to measure carrier performance over time rather than relying on isolated delivery issues.
The app combines the same fulfillment and customer support data used across your GlideOS apps, bringing together shipment data and support tickets reporting lost or damaged packages, to create a complete view of carrier performance. Instead of piecing information together from multiple systems and spreadsheets, your team can compare delivery times, damage rates, lost shipments, and on-time delivery performance for every carrier in one place without manual data entry.
AI analyzes that data over time to identify performance trends and surface the reasons behind them. It might detect that delivery times have been slipping for one carrier over the past month, or that damaged package reports have increased on a particular shipping route. Your team can investigate the underlying cause before it becomes a larger problem.
With carrier performance tracked and analyzed over time, your team has the data to renegotiate contracts, recover costs where service guarantees haven't been met, shift more delivery volume to higher-performing carriers, or replace carriers that consistently fall short of their commitments.
5. Warehouse receiving and inspection app
A warehouse receiving and inspection app creates an accurate record of what was actually received against every purchase order the moment a shipment arrives. Catching shortages, damaged goods, or incorrect items at the receiving dock prevents inventory errors and invoice discrepancies from spreading through the rest of your operation.
Warehouse staff scan items against the purchase order using a barcode scanner on the mobile app as each shipment comes in. If an item is damaged or doesn’t meet quality standards, they take photos from the app and attach them to the shipment record. AI analyzes each image and generates a written description of the item’s condition, giving anyone reviewing shipments later both visual evidence and a searchable record. Short shipments, damaged goods, and incorrect items are flagged the moment they're logged, and routed to the person who manages that supplier relationship.
The app uses the same receiving data as your payment reconciliation app, so invoice discrepancies can be traced back to what was actually delivered rather than what the supplier billed. The verified inventory data also updates your other GlideOS apps, so every team works from an accurate stock count from the moment goods are received.
Commercial and pricing
Product, pricing, and subscription data for an e-tail business is spread across disconnected tools and spreadsheets. Custom GlideOS apps bring that data together so what’s live on any channel matches what your team actually approved.
6. Product catalog and SKU management app
A product catalog and SKU management app gives every product one master record, so a price change, new image, or updated attribute only needs to be made once before it appears everywhere that SKU is used.
Each SKU stores structured information including pricing, supplier details, product specifications, images, and channel-specific notes. AI uses those attributes and images to generate product descriptions for your team to review, edit, and approve.
Adding new products follows the same structured process. Your team creates a new SKU using a structured intake form or uploads product specifications and supplier documentation. The app uses OCR to read the documents and populate the record automatically. Your team reviews the extracted information, makes any changes, and approves the product, making it available across your catalog and every connected GlideOS app.
Because images live alongside the product data, the app also functions as a visual product catalog. Instead of scanning spreadsheet rows, your team can quickly see which products are ready to publish and which are still missing images, descriptions, or other required information.
With every product managed from a single record, your team spends less time maintaining product information and can publish accurate listings across every sales channel more quickly.
7. Subscription operations management app
A subscription operations management app gives your team a live view of subscriber health, helping you spot and fix retention problems before they become cancellations.
The app tracks subscription metrics including monthly active subscribers, new subscribers, churn rate, and cancellation reasons. It also shows monthly recurring revenue at the subscriber level and highlights upcoming renewals, shipments, and payments. Your team can see committed revenue weeks in advance and make sure there’s enough inventory available before recurring orders are due.
From the app, your team can pause or resume subscriptions, skip a shipment, apply a discount, retry a failed payment, or change a subscriber's plan. Those changes are written back to your subscription platform, with every connected GlideOS app updating automatically so inventory reservations, upcoming shipments, revenue forecasts, and subscriber health stay in sync.
AI reviews signals across the subscriber base, including failed payments, skipped shipments, and drops in engagement, to flag accounts at elevated risk of cancelling. Your team can be proactive and start retention outreach while those subscribers are still active rather than waiting until a cancellation request comes in.
By bringing subscriber health, payments, shipments, and recurring revenue into one app, your team can make better inventory, fulfillment, and retention decisions from the same live data.
Finance operations
Finance operations reveal where revenue is being lost, whether through disputes, reconciliation issues, or operational problems elsewhere in the business. Custom GlideOS apps help finance teams investigate, reconcile, and respond more efficiently while giving leadership the information they need to reduce future losses.
8. Chargeback and dispute management app
A chargeback and dispute management app helps your finance team respond to disputes faster while giving leadership the information they need to reduce future disputes across the business.
When a new chargeback is opened, the app automatically creates a dispute case and adds it to a home screen with its current status and submission deadline. Your team can immediately see every open dispute: what's waiting for review, and which cases are at risk of becoming an automatic loss if the deadline is missed.
Each dispute record pulls in the evidence needed to defend the claim from connected GlideOS apps and other business systems. This can include order confirmations, delivery records, customer communications, support history, and any other information relevant to the dispute. AI uses the assembled evidence to draft a response explaining why the charge is legitimate, which your team reviews, edits, and submits. Instead of manually gathering evidence from different systems and spreadsheets, your finance team gets everything they need in one place.
Every dispute also becomes operational data. AI groups disputes into recurring patterns and helps you understand what's driving them. A rise in “unauthorized transaction” disputes can highlight fraud exposure, while more “product not received” disputes may point to carrier or fulfillment problems. Instead of treating each chargeback as an isolated case, your team can identify and address the operational issues creating them.
9. Payment reconciliation app
A payment reconciliation app gives your finance team a structured workflow for reconciling payments across every sales channel, making it easier to identify discrepancies before they become accounting problems.
The app pulls together payout information from each sales channel and matches it against orders, refunds, chargebacks, fees, and the payments received by your business. Instead of comparing reports and spreadsheets line by line, your team works through a single reconciliation workflow that flags transactions that don't match and need investigation.
Finance leaders can monitor reconciliation status, outstanding discrepancies, and unreconciled balances from dashboards, making it easy to see which channels or payout periods still need attention. As transactions are reconciled, the app maintains a complete audit trail of every adjustment and resolution.
The same workflow applies across every channel, so adding new sales channels or increasing order volume doesn’t create new reconciliation processes in spreadsheets.
Customer operations
Customer operations span customer service, returns, fulfillment, and finance, but customers expect every interaction to feel like it’s coming from one business. Custom GlideOS apps give every team the same view of orders, returns, and customer history so issues can be resolved quickly and consistently.
10. Returns and refunds tracker
A returns and refunds tracker gives your team a complete view of returns across every sales channel, making it easier to identify recurring issues and monitor refund costs.
The app pulls return data from every sales channel and displays it in live dashboards showing return volume, refund costs, return reasons, processing status, and trends across the business. Instead of switching between each sales channel or combining data from spreadsheets to understand return performance, you get customized dashboards of returns across your e-tail business. Customer service, operations, and finance all work from the same return data without duplicate data entry or disconnected spreadsheets.
AI groups return reasons into themes such as defects, sizing issues, and damaged or incorrect items delivered. Your team can spot recurring patterns and identify whether rising return rates are linked to a product, supplier, carrier, sales channel, or shipping route.
You can address the underlying cause based on complete data, whether that means improving a product, addressing supplier quality issues, fixing carrier or shipping route problems, or improving product listings on a specific sales channel.
11. Customer service operations app
A customer service operations app gives your support team one place to manage customer cases with the order, fulfillment, and customer data they need already connected.
Support agents can see a customer’s order history, shipment status, return records, and previous support tickets from one app instead of switching between multiple systems or waiting for updates from other teams. GlideOS also connects directly to support platforms like Zendesk and Gorgias, allowing agents to create and update tickets, add notes, reassign cases, send replies, apply macros, and close or escalate tickets without leaving the app. Where the sales channel permits, they can take actions such as issuing refunds directly from the custom app. If an action has to be completed inside the sales channel, the customer case in your GlideOS app updates automatically when the order or refund status changes there.
Your agents get an AI-generated summary of the customer’s purchase, returns, and support history before they respond so they can understand the context of the case without reading through multiple records. AI can also suggest draft replies based on your support policies for agents to review before sending.
Support teams manage customer cases in the app, while leadership monitors resolution times, recurring issues, case volumes, and team performance from the same underlying data.
Marketing operations
Marketing operations rely on product information, approved content, campaign planning, and customer insights staying in sync. Custom GlideOS apps connect those workflows so your team can launch campaigns faster and make decisions from current information.
12. Content operations and AI content studio
A content operations and AI content studio cuts the time between a new product landing in your catalog and accurate, on-brand copy being ready for every sales channel.
GlideOS’s AI Commerce Content Studio manages the entire content workflow from one app. Each product listing uses the same data as your SKU management app, including product attributes, specifications, and images. Your team selects a sales channel, and AI uses that product data to generate a version of the product description tailored to that channel. Your team reviews, edits, and approves all content before it's published.
Approved content moves through a structured workflow instead of emails or shared spreadsheets, giving your team a single record of every draft, edit, approval, and publisher. Everyone can see what’s ready to publish and what’s still waiting for review.
Once approved, the content is immediately available across connected GlideOS apps. For example, the campaign planning app uses approved copy and creative automatically, so marketing teams build campaigns from content that's already been signed off instead of waiting for approvals or searching for the latest version.
Your marketing team spends less time managing content across channels and more time launching products and campaigns.
13. Campaign and creative operations app
A campaign and creative operations app gives your team one place to plan, monitor, and measure every promotion, seasonal campaign, and acquisition campaign instead of piecing information together from multiple tools and spreadsheets.
The app brings campaign planning, budget tracking, influencer marketing, creative production, and performance into one place. Marketing leaders get live dashboards showing campaign progress, budgets, approvals, and performance metrics, making it easier to identify campaigns that are behind schedule, waiting on approvals, or overspending before they affect a launch or promotion.
AI drafts campaign briefs from a product and campaign objective, summarizes performance across campaigns, flags underperforming campaigns, and recommends budget reallocations based on live performance data. Your team reviews and approves every recommendation. Copy and creative approved in the content operations app are immediately available in the campaign planning app, so every campaign starts with approved assets rather than drafts still waiting for review.
Because campaign planning stays connected to your product, content, and performance data, every campaign moves from planning to launch with shared budgets, approved assets, and live performance metrics.
14. Customer relationship management (CRM) app
A customer relationship management (CRM) app gives your team one record for every customer across every sales channel, giving your team a complete view of every customer’s relationship with your e-commerce business.
The CRM combines purchase history, lifetime value, return behavior, customer support tickets, and interactions into one profile. It can automatically match customer records across channels using identifiers like email address and phone number, with an audit trail for every merge. When marketplaces like Amazon mask customer details, those orders remain as separate customer profiles until enough information becomes available to confidently match them.
With a complete customer profile, your team can identify your highest-value customers, build more targeted customer segments, and decide where to invest in retention based on a customer's full history across every sales channel. If you already use Salesforce or HubSpot, GlideOS integrates directly with both platforms so your existing customer data stays connected.
AI can identify customers to prioritize for retention, uncover behavioral segments your team hasn't defined manually, and summarize a customer’s purchase, returns, and support history before a sales or support conversation.
Bringing customer, sales, and support data into one place helps every team work from the same customer record, leading to more personalized marketing, better customer service, and stronger retention.
Vendor and team operations
As an e-tail business grows, managing integrations, sales channels, vendors, and external partners becomes increasingly difficult to coordinate across teams. Custom GlideOS apps give every team shared workflows and records to work from, which reduces delays, improves accountability, and makes day-to-day operations easier to manage.
15. Retail integration ops hub
A retail integration ops hub gives your operations and technical teams one place to identify data discrepancies across connected systems and resolve them before they affect customers or day-to-day operations.
Every new sales channel, warehouse, supplier, and software platform introduces another opportunity for systems to fall out of sync. GlideOS’s Retail Integration Ops Hub compares operational data across connected systems and flags discrepancies for investigation before they become oversold inventory, missed shipments, invoice errors, or customer service issues. Every issue is tracked through to resolution, creating a complete audit trail of what happened and when.
The hub works alongside your other GlideOS apps. Apps that manage inventory, fulfillment, suppliers, and logistics provide the operational data the hub compares across connected systems. Other GlideOS apps use information from the hub in their own workflows. For example, executive dashboards display exception volumes and resolution rates, the customer service app displays an order’s audit trail, and the payment reconciliation app uses invoice discrepancies to investigate financial variances.
As your e-commerce business adds more sales channels, suppliers, and software, the app gives your team a single place to identify, investigate, and resolve discrepancies across every connected system.
16. Vendor management app
A vendor management app gives your operations team one place to manage every supplier, carrier, 3PL, technology provider, and agency relationship from onboarding through contract renewal.
Each vendor has a single record containing contacts, contracts, service level agreements, documents, renewal dates, and performance history. Different vendor types follow different onboarding workflows, so a new carrier, 3PL, or creative agency is automatically assigned the relevant checklist. Procurement, legal, finance, IT, and operations complete their assigned tasks in the app, with reminders and escalations keeping onboarding moving. Vendors go live only when every required step has been completed.
AI extracts key information from uploaded contracts, identifies missing or inconsistent information before a vendor goes live, summarizes a vendor's relationship history before review meetings or contract renewals, and highlights vendors generating recurring operational issues across connected GlideOS apps.
The vendor management app serves as the central record for every external partner. Your fulfillment app references 3PL records, carrier performance links to carrier records, and supplier information connects to your product catalog. Teams work from the same up-to-date vendor information at all times.
By managing every vendor relationship from one app, your team can onboard partners faster, keep documentation current, and identify performance or compliance issues before they affect day-to-day operations.
Build an operating system for your online business
Every app in this guide solves a specific operational problem. The bigger opportunity comes when those apps begin working together. You don’t need to transform your entire e-commerce operation overnight or build all 16 apps. Start with the workflow creating the biggest bottleneck today. Then build the next app where it will remove the most manual work or give another team access to the same operational data.
As you add more GlideOS apps over time, your business moves away from disconnected spreadsheets and software towards a connected operational system where every team works from the same accurate, real-time information.
