The management system stays in charge and updates the site itself

The heart of GlobalGameStore isn't the website. It's Bman, the shop's management system. Stock, prices, orders and the till all live there, and that's where the staff work all day.

A new online shop couldn't replace it, and it mustn't force anyone to copy data by hand from one place to another.

The problem: two places to keep in sync

With the old site, the catalogue was always being chased. Every new release, every price change, every sold-out item was one more update to make or to wait for.

Bman also has its own rules. From outside you can read almost everything but write almost nothing: products and prices can only be changed inside the management system. The site had to adapt to that, not the other way round.

Bman speaks up, the site updates

On 10 August we imported the whole catalogue: 2,162 products, without a single error. From then on the site takes everything from Bman: names, prices, stock, photos.

At first the site asked for updates on a schedule: stock every fifteen minutes, products only overnight. Since September, Bman tells the site about every change. A price or stock level changed in the shop shows up online in about a minute.

Online orders flow back into the management system

When a customer pays on the site, the order lands in Bman by itself, with the invoicing details: tax code for private customers, VAT number and e-invoicing code for businesses.

One small detail that matters: the site thinks in universal time, Bman in Italian time. Without converting, evening orders would have slipped into the next day.

For pickup in Bari, staff do nothing new. They prepare and close the order in Bman as always. Within five minutes the site notices, tells the customer they can come by and, once the order is closed, marks it as completed.

Shipping: we answer like the old shop did

GlobalGameStore ships with BRT through EasySped, a program that reads orders from the website and writes the tracking number back. EasySped only knew how to talk to the old site.

Rather than change how the warehouse works, we taught the new site to answer like the old one: same questions, same answers, same format. On switchover day, EasySped only needs a new address and access key.

When the tracking comes back, the order is marked as shipped and the customer gets the email, exactly once. On the old site that step always ended in an error.

Missing photos go back into Bman

Checking the catalogue, we found 563 products without a working photo. The shop's Studio now looks for them by itself: first on the old site's pages, then on the web. AI checks the images it finds, and a person confirms.

The chosen photo is cleaned up, placed on a white background and uploaded to Bman. So it doesn't just live on the website, it's in the management system too. The site then resizes it for every screen: on a catalogue card it drops from 89 to 16 kilobytes.

No old link gets lost

The old site had 3,752 addresses: products, categories, brands, service pages. They're on Google, in customers' bookmarks, in social posts.

Each one now leads to the right new page with a permanent redirect. A product goes to its new page, a category to the new category. If a product no longer exists, the link goes to the homepage instead of an error page.

The new site also has its own map for Google and a catalogue feed ready for Google Shopping. The goal is simple: change websites without losing ground in search results.

What changes for the shop

Nothing new to learn. Staff work in Bman as before and ship with EasySped as before. The site keeps itself up to date.

The site is in testing. Moving the domain is the last step, and it doesn't require touching the management system.