More than 30 stores, one inventory: how we choose where each order ships from

Imagiq, Samsung's official distributor in Colombia, has more than 30 points of sale. Each one managed its inventory separately: what ran out in one city was left over in another, and an online order could show as out of stock even though the product sat a few blocks from the customer.

We built an algorithm that, for every order, matches the stock of every store against the real distance to the customer. With that it picks the best store and generates the shipping label, with nobody deciding by hand.

The distance is not a straight line on a map but the real one, from the Google Distance Matrix API. The storefront runs on Next.js and the back end on NestJS with PostgreSQL and Redis.

The whole network works as a single inventory, with deliveries in 24 hours at most. A product is available as long as it exists in any store, and ships from the one that can get there first.