How a wholesale apparel and glassware distributor moved from manual multi-channel order entry to hundreds of orders shipping daily without a single human in the loop, while the owner ran the business from Aruba.
Erazor Bits, founded in 1993, designs and distributes custom silk-screened apparel and glassware. When the company expanded into drop-shipping, operational complexity spiked: orders flowed in from a website, Amazon, and Shopify, each in a different format with different validation rules.
Staff manually matched orders to items, determined warehouse assignments, calculated shipping, and generated documentation. The work consumed the daily effort of three full-time employees. Meanwhile, the owner needed the operation to run autonomously so he could run the business from Aruba.
Website, Amazon, and Shopify each delivered orders in their own structure. Staff translated by hand.
Order matching, warehouse assignment, shipping calculation, and document generation, all manual.
Stockouts and over-orders were a regular cost of doing business.
Running a US-based wholesale operation from Aruba required the system to handle daily orders end-to-end.
Atelion built a system designed around how orders actually flow: in from any channel, out to the right warehouse, packed and shipped without intervention. The only step that requires a human is the warehouse staff scanning barcodes during print and pack.
Automatic ingestion from website, Amazon, and Shopify, with data validation and variant matching across all sources.
Automatic order splitting, shipping method selection, and warehouse assignment based on inventory location and customer destination.
Direct batch processing with automatic tracking number and invoice generation. Shipping documentation flows back into the system without human touch.
Barcode labels and packing slips sent to warehouse printers. The only human touchpoint in the pipeline.
Stock tracking with configurable thresholds and automated purchase order generation when reorder points are hit.
Automatic backorder creation with inventory notifications, so customers and the team always know what is coming and when.
The pipeline that consumed three full-time roles now runs without intervention. The owner runs the business from Aruba. The warehouse handles a fraction of the cognitive load it used to.
“What I do on a daily basis would require three people to do… and I do it myself.”
Multi-channel distributors face the same compounding cost: every new sales channel adds a new format, a new set of rules, and a new set of manual steps to translate that channel into something the rest of the operation can act on. Add it up across three channels, multiple warehouses, and a few thousand SKUs, and you have a full team doing nothing but moving data between systems.
Atelion’s job is to make the channel layer disappear. The orders come in. The right product ships from the right warehouse. The team gets to do work that actually requires people.
Tell us where the work piles up before the actual work can start. We’ll tell you whether automation and AI can help, and whether we’re the right team to build it.
Talk with us