WOW Concept treats its stores as living billboards for the brands it discovers. The Madrid retailer, roughly five years old, curates 300 to 400 mostly digital-first brands across buildings of 3,000 to 8,000 square meters, then extends that edit online where the assortment can run far deeper. To pull it off, WOW needs its store technology to move as fast as the brands it champions.
On its old system, it couldn't. Every new capability meant a slow, heavy development cycle. On Shopify POS, WOW found the opposite: a fast install, a native app ecosystem to connect the rest of its stack, and the freedom to build custom tools where the business needed something of its own.
Since moving to Shopify POS, WOW Concept has:
- Cut new-location POS install time to about a minute, with little to no staff training required
- Connected its Odoo ERP through native Shopify apps, a faster path than the heavy custom builds its previous systems required
- Built custom apps of its own, including a store-based order-picking app that handles roughly 80% of online order fulfillment
The challenge: Store tech too rigid to keep up
WOW's ambition depends on constant change. The team refreshes stores radically every six months and adds brands continuously. That rhythm collided with a point-of-sale system that treated every adjustment as a custom development.
"Before, we used Retail Pro. It was a great system, but definitely not a good fit for our strategic plan," said Dimas Gimeno, Founder at WOW Concept. "We did not want to adapt legacy systems to the digital age. We aimed to build from a digital reality to lead what comes next, and Shopify was the answer."
Under Retail Pro, shipping a change could take months, and connecting the store to other systems meant building and maintaining heavy external developments. For a small, fast company, that pace was a tax on the whole model. The team had chosen tools built for large, mature, physical-first retailers, and inherited their rigidity.
The store analytics told the same story. Traffic counting ran through an outside telecom vendor whose data landed in spreadsheets, disconnected from what was actually happening on the sales floor. WOW could see visitor counts a week later. It could not act on them in the moment.
The solution: A fast POS core plus an ecosystem to build on
Shopify POS changed the baseline. Installing it in a new location takes about a minute, and the interface is simple enough that staff can ring up a sale with little or no training. "Installing it takes literally minutes," said Sylvie Degrange, Chief Digital & Omnichannel Officer at WOW Concept. "Even without training, anyone can take a payment with Shopify. It's that simple." New features arrive on their own, week after week, without WOW lifting a finger.
Adding new functionalities to Shopify POS takes literally minutes. The ecosystem of ready-to-use solutions makes the product grow with you at a speed I never experienced before
Where WOW needs functionality the platform doesn't offer out of the box, it reaches into the app ecosystem, or it builds. Connecting its new Odoo ERP ran through a recommended native app rather than a bespoke integration. "With our previous system it went fine too, but it was a longer process because we had to build heavier external developments," Sylvie said. "That's a big advantage of Shopify." The team replaced its old telecom-run traffic counter with AVIA, an analytics app that lives inside Shopify and brings ecommerce analytics to physical retail. Managers get real-time conversion data by hour, floor, and customer demographic, with each floor measured like its own store and connected to the rest of the unified data the business is producing.
WOW moved payments from Adyen into Shopify Payments, a two-click switch that folded them into the same ecosystem and closed earlier security and reconciliation gaps.
Working with an agency, the WOW team created a picking app to manage order preparation from the shop floor, where about 80% of online orders are fulfilled. The store team gained custom picking lists and order states, tuned to how WOW actually works.
The standout capability, though, is the endless aisle. Associates can sell anything WOW carries, even items not physically in that store, as an order that ships to the customer.
"That way we don't lose sales, and the sale still belongs to the associate," said Julián Lázaro, Chief Commercial Officer at WOW Concept. "It's not, they'll buy it on the web so I won't get my commission. It's their sale, their customer." A recent update let the team run true click and collect directly from the store, one more example of the platform improving underneath them.
The result: Faster launches, richer data, and room to grow
The payoff shows up as speed and control. WOW spins up point of sale in new spaces almost instantly, trains staff in minutes, and connects new systems through apps instead of multi-month builds. That agility is the whole point for a company that reinvents its stores twice a year.
The analytics shift was, in the team's words, a before and after. Managers now cross-reference live traffic against sales to schedule staff, spot conversion gaps by floor, and anticipate which products will sell out early. "The difference is huge, being able to give real-time information to the teams so they can act on it," Julián said.
If we separate traffic from sales and don't put it in the hands of people who can act, we're just looking in the rearview mirror.
That ecosystem-plus-custom approach flows straight into results across the business. On the web, conversion roughly doubled, from close to 1% to 2%. Online sales grew 75 to 80% in the first half of 2026 versus the same period in 2025, and physical sales rose 35% year over year. Because the whole stack shares one view of stock and customers, cancellations and returns rose only 20% while sales value climbed about 80%.
For WOW, the case for building on Shopify POS is now something it recommends to other retailers, including the large department-store operators it sees as stuck on aging systems. "I've had other lives before, with 200 stores running Shopify online but not in store, and managing the two separately is a nightmare," Julián said. "Having both together, one customer, one stock, one source of data, is a radical change. The way you operate shifts completely."