GreenHouse

Lawn and garden inventory has a property most retail categories don't: a lot of it is alive. A pallet of annuals loses value every day it sits, and the difference between a small markdown this week and a write-off next month is how quickly someone in the aisle can see the problem and act on it. That is why the app is built around speed at the shelf. A markdown is one tap plus a reason code, not a trip to the back office, so the person standing in front of the aging stock is the person who prices it, at the moment they notice it.

Reason codes are the quiet centerpiece of the design. A markdown without a reason is just a lower price; a markdown with a reason code is data. Because every price cut records why it happened (damage, seasonality, overstock, aging product), the business gets a picture of where value is leaking, not just that it leaked. Codes are picked from a structured list rather than typed, which keeps the data clean enough to compare across stores and seasons, and keeps the flow fast enough that teams actually use it on a busy floor.

Real-time inventory only stays real if it is updated where stock actually moves, so the app carries the receiving and order-detail workflows too. Product is counted in when it arrives, adjusted when it is marked down, and reflected immediately in the dashboards, which means the sales-performance view managers look at is the same source of truth the floor team is writing to. There is no nightly spreadsheet reconciliation because there is no spreadsheet: the app replaced it.

Garden centers and greenhouse ranges are hostile territory for connectivity, so the capture layer is offline-friendly by design. Team members keep scanning, marking down, and receiving even when the signal drops among the racks or out in the yard, and the app syncs the work once a connection returns. Sync is designed to be boring on purpose: work queues in the order it happened and applies when the device reconnects, so a morning spent offline looks no different in the dashboards than a morning spent online. Role-based access rounds out the operational side: store teams see the workflows they need for the day's tasks, while managers get the cross-store performance view, each role scoped to what it should touch.

The app was built with React Native on the front end, backed by a Node.js API with PostgreSQL, AWS infrastructure, and Firebase services, a stack chosen so one codebase serves the whole field team while the backend keeps every store consistent. The outcome the client measured is the one on this page: a 6 to 8 percent lift in sales, driven by markdowns applied consistently and early, less product wasted, and merchandising decisions made from live data instead of last week's spreadsheet.