With a rich heritage dating back to 1946, Swee Lee has established themselves as a premier retailer and distributor of musical instruments, equipment, lifestyle merchandise, and online music courses in Southeast Asia. From guitars and drums to keyboards and vinyl, Swee Lee curates a diverse range of products, catering to musical enthusiasts of all kinds.
In 2017, faced with a rapidly evolving market landscape, Swee Lee made the strategic decision to migrate from Magento (now Adobe Commerce) to Shopify. This transition marked a pivotal moment in Swee Lee's hunt for enhanced scalability and operational efficiency, as they sought to unify inventory management and streamline cross-channel operations.
Adopting Shopify empowered Swee Lee to overcome the limitations of their previous platform, powering seamless integration of the brand’s physical and online stores through the Shopify POS system. With a focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences, Swee Lee used Shopify's intuitive platform to expand their online presence across multiple countries while maintaining a cohesive brand identity.
Since moving to Shopify, Swee Lee has seen:
- 50% YoY increase in online revenue
- 17% YoY growth in POS revenue
- 60,000 SKUs managed online and in stores
- 6 international stores launched
The challenge: Fragmented views stifled scalability
In 2012, as the demand for ecommerce steadily rose in Singapore, Swee Lee captured the opportunity and launched their online channel. The brand prioritized a customizable platform, making Magento a suitable choice at the time. In a few years, Swee Lee began dominating the local market with booming popularity. But as the brand set their sights on accelerated local and cross-border growth, they had to overcome key challenges.
Their previous platform did not support a unified POS system, which forced Swee Lee to rely on numerous third-party inventory systems. This naturally led to a divided view across their channels. For a brand that dealt with over tens of thousands of SKUs at any given time, this was painful, as a lot of manual work was required to manage stock information. For example, if a customer inquired about a purchase, Swee Lee had to cross-reference details among stores, pinpoint the exact buying location, and then assist them.
Another pain point was the heavy customization and back-end coding required to keep the website running. Not only did this lead to a cost and resource drain but it also compromised Swee Lee’s ability to focus on fast-paced scalability. To hit their targets of cross-border growth, the brand knew they needed a platform which was intuitive for their teams to use while also giving them powerful features to support growth.
The solution: A unified view propels growth
Seeking a platform that could support their multichannel business and accelerate future growth, Swee Lee migrated to Shopify in 2017. To unify views across channels, they implemented Shopify POS. This feature seamlessly integrated with Swee Lee’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and product information management (PIM) systems, streamlining operations.
The Swee Lee website is the main touch point for most of our customers so it’s very important that both the online and offline support each other. Shopify enables the seamless integration between what is available for the online app and the POS app, making it very easy for our team to connect the dots.
Swee Lee equipped each retail store with iPads and iPhones loaded with the POS app. An iPad was stationed at the checkout counter, while staff used iPhones to serve customers and check stock, boosting the overall efficiency when dealing with customer enquiries.
As a customer enters the store, they can browse to look for what they’re interested in. But if they don’t find what they want, they can access our entire online inventory through our Shopify POS system. They’re able to select the product that’s listed online and have it shipped to them directly, sometimes even on the same day.
Shopify POS also helped Swee Lee gain analytics based on location, a crucial insight that powered the brand’s understanding of customer demands and sales volumes across channels.
Recently, the brand has taken it up a notch by introducing the POS Go system, a mobile point-of-sale hardware system designed for convenience. This has further fuelled Swee Lee’s operational efficiency, allowing the staff to sell directly on the floor by processing payments anywhere in the store, promptly act on customer requests and feedback, and gain real-time visibility into back-end stock.
With Shopify, each of our stores are run using the same tool and share the same inventory and customer database. Our online store and all of our retail outlets across different countries function as one, enabling our teams to communicate and collaborate more effectively.
For cross-border expansion, Swee Lee turned to the Shopify Plus plan’s expansion stores, a feature that lets merchants create up to nine easy and customizable storefronts. This capability empowered Swee Lee to focus on speedy scalability as it was simple to create a new online channel that aligned with the brand’s overall look and feel while still being customized to suit individual market needs. With Shopify, the brand could simply replicate the theme of the main Singapore online store and adapt other aspects to tailor it to new markets.
We initially launched in Singapore and, since then, have expanded our online store to six additional countries. For our recent launch in the Philippines, our Singapore-based Swee Lee team managed to set up the store within weeks. With Shopify’s system, the scalability is very high.
The results: Mastering the omnichannel experience
With Shopify POS, Swee Lee unified their inventory management across physical and online stores. With approximately 60,000 SKUs in their system, Shopify supported the brand in having real-time omnichannel inventory tracking, giving both online customers and retail staff access to accurate product availability information.
What I love about Shopify is that it provides us with a unified source of data, allowing us to get better stats and make better decisions. If there’s anything that needs to be solved on the customer support front or after sales, being able to have complete visibility in one place really helps that process. This has cut down our resolution time from days to something we could solve within a couple of minutes.
It has also allowed Swee Lee to offer services such as click-and-collect and online appointments for in-store shopping, which has been paramount for selling high-ticket specialty items, like rare guitars.
Additionally, Shopify's built-in features and intuitive platform have empowered Swee Lee to expand internationally while maintaining a unified source of data. Since migrating, Swee Lee has launched six online stores across the region.
We want to partner with technologies and tools that are forward looking and are able to help us as we scale and grow. What’s exciting about Shopify—it’s also on the same trajectory as us, continually changing and coming up with something new.
