Swee Lee Achieves Omni-Channel Success, Increasing Sales by 293%

With a rich heritage dating back to 1946, Swee Lee has established itself as a leading retailer and distributor of musical instruments, equipment, lifestyle goods 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 music lovers of all kinds.

In 2017, faced with a rapidly changing market landscape, Swee Lee made the strategic decision to migrate from Magento (now Adobe Commerce) to Shopify. This change marked a pivotal moment in Swee Lee’s drive to increase scalability and operational efficiency as they sought to unify inventory management and streamline cross-channel operations.

Adopting Shopify allowed Swee Lee to overcome the limitations of its previous platform, enabling seamless integration of the brand’s physical and online stores through Shopify POS. With a focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences, Swee Lee leveraged Shopify’s intuitive platform to expand its online presence across multiple countries while maintaining a consistent brand identity.

Since switching to Shopify, Swee Lee has observed:

• Online revenue up 50% year over year
• POS revenue growth of 17% y/y
• 60,000 SKUs managed online and in stores
• 6 international stores opened

Challenge: Fragmented views limited scalability

In 2012, as the demand for e-commerce in Singapore was steadily growing, Swee Lee seized the opportunity and launched its online channel. The brand prioritized a platform with customizable features, making Magento the right choice at the time. Within a few years, Swee Lee began dominating the local market, gaining increasing popularity. However, as the brand focused on accelerating local and cross-border growth, it had to overcome key challenges.

Their previous platform didn’t support a unified POS system, forcing Swee Lee to rely on multiple third-party inventory systems. This naturally led to a fragmented view of their channels. For a brand that handled over tens of thousands of SKUs at any given time, this was painful because managing inventory information required a lot of manual work. For example, if a customer inquired about a purchase, Swee Lee had to compare details between stores, pinpoint the exact location of the purchase, and then help them.

Another problem was the heavy customization and backend coding required to keep the site running. Not only did this drain costs and resources, it also limited Swee Lee’s ability to focus on rapid scalability. To achieve its cross-border growth goals, the brand knew it needed a platform that was intuitive for its teams, while also offering them powerful features to support growth.

Solution: A unified view drives growth

Seeking a platform that could support their omnichannel business and accelerate future growth, Swee Lee migrated to Shopify in 2017. To unify views across channels, they implemented Shopify POS. The feature seamlessly integrated with Swee Lee’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and product information management (PIM) systems, streamlining operations.

Swee Lee equipped each retail store with iPads and iPhones with a POS app installed. The iPad was placed at the checkout while employees served customers and checked inventory on their iPhones, increasing overall efficiency in handling customer inquiries.

The Shopify POS platform also enabled Swee Lee to analyze data based on location, which provided key insight into the brand’s understanding of customer needs and sales volume across channels.

The brand recently took it a step further by introducing POS Go, a mobile retail hardware system designed with convenience in mind. This has fueled Swee Lee’s operational efficiency even further, allowing staff to sell directly on the floor, process payments anywhere in the store, respond quickly to customer requests and feedback, and gain real-time insight into inventory.

To expand cross-border, Swee Lee turned to stores that upgraded to Shopify Plus, a feature that lets merchants create up to nine easy-to-use, customizable storefronts. This capability allowed Swee Lee to focus on rapid scalability, as it was easy to create a new online channel that was consistent with the brand’s overall look and feel while also being tailored to the market’s unique needs. With Shopify, the brand could simply replicate the theme of its main online store in Singapore and tweak other aspects to adapt to new markets.

Results: Mastering the Omni-Channel Experience

With Shopify POS, Swee Lee unified inventory management across physical and online stores. With around 60,000 SKUs in its system, Shopify helped the brand track inventory in real time across multiple channels, giving both online customers and retail staff access to accurate product availability information.

This allows Swee Lee to offer services such as click and collect and online in-store shopping arrangements, which is crucial when selling expensive specialty items such as rare guitars.

In addition, Shopify’s built-in features and intuitive platform have allowed Swee Lee to expand internationally while maintaining a single data source. Since the migration, Swee Lee has launched six online stores in the region.