A bottle of wine can be in stock and still be invisible. It sits on a shelf in the local shop, available to anyone walking through the door, while the website presents a different assortment or sends an order through another part of the business. For a retailer, that is an awkward way to compete. For itim Group plc, it is a reason to exist.
The London software company builds the connections between the shop, the website, the stockroom and the supplier. Its argument is that physical retailers already possess useful assets for digital commerce: inventory close to customers, knowledgeable employees and established local relationships. The difficult part is making those assets available whenever and however someone wants to buy.
That proposition has a concrete expression at Majestic Wine. Shop Local, built on itim’s UNIFY platform, lets shoppers browse live inventory at nearby stores. According to the published case study, it accounted for one in three online orders within 18 months. The denominator matters: online orders, not all Majestic sales, and not a measured one-third increase in revenue.
Online orders through Shop Local within 18 months, according to the published case study.
The wine shop gets a second front door
Shop Local’s appeal is easy to picture. Someone planning dinner can see what is available nearby before making the trip or placing an order. The branch’s stock becomes part of its digital offer. The store team remains involved in the relationship. A retailer can make more use of the shops it already operates.
Majestic’s trade business supplied a different problem. Its commercial customers had relied on manual, telephone-based ordering. Itim helped build a self-service B2B portal for more than 3,000 commercial customers, with round-the-clock ordering, stock visibility and control of multiple accounts or locations. Financial reconciliation and electronic data exchange sit alongside the buying experience.
The two projects earned itim and Majestic three Retail Systems Awards in 2025. They also show why “retail software” can be a misleadingly tidy description. The work reaches from someone choosing a bottle to a business checking an account. The visible website is one part of a much longer chain of decisions.
Before the software, there was the advice
Founder and chief executive Ali Athar arrived through the operational side of technology. After Cambridge, he worked at IBM as a database specialist, then founded systems design and integration business Inforem in 1982. A spell at CSC followed its acquisition of Inforem. His subsequent consulting work brought him into the workings of established retail businesses.
Itim started in 1993. Proprietary software entered the picture in 1999, and by 2004 the company was focused exclusively on digital technology. Those dates explain an apparent oddity: a business established in the early 1990s celebrated its twentieth birthday in 2024. The celebration followed the software chapter of the story.
The original name stood for Introducing Transformation in Management. That is a fairly substantial promise to squeeze into four letters. The consulting inheritance remains visible in the company’s description of itself: “We are Retail Engineers.” Its stated mission centres on helping retailers move towards a unified business model quickly and at lower cost.
Its own history describes the change in thinking. In 2008, it saw customers losing market share to online specialists. By 2012, it viewed omnichannel commerce as an opportunity. In 2016, the emphasis shifted towards customer data and digital engagement through stores. Each step made the physical network more central to the proposed answer.
Follow the order, then follow the money
UNIFY organises the offer around four connected areas: sales, stock, pricing and supply. A retailer can adopt modules that supplement existing systems or replace parts of them. This matters because a chain’s technology decisions rarely begin with an empty building and a blank spreadsheet. There are tills, contracts, established processes and people who know how the old arrangements work.
On the sales side, the platform covers checkout, assisted selling and customer orders. Order management routes demand against available inventory and the retailer’s own rules. The Entertainer, another longstanding customer, uses itim technology for services including 30-minute click-and-collect. The practical question behind the button is whether a specific toy can actually be found and handed over.
Stock tools address buying, product ranges, allocation, replenishment and the movement of goods between locations. Merchandise management also includes sales auditing and supplier records. A chain might have plenty of an item overall while individual shops run short. Better distribution can be as important as buying more.
Profimetrics brings forecasting and optimisation to pricing, promotions, markdowns and inventory. Retailers can compare scenarios before changing prices, work within business rules and review recommendations. Its strategy assistant, Maya, takes her name from Maia, the Portuguese city where Profimetrics originated. Even enterprise software occasionally gets a hometown tribute.
Supplier collaboration completes the circuit through electronic data interchange, invoice automation and self-billing. Invoice matching sounds like an accounts-department concern until a discrepancy reveals that goods received and goods charged for do not agree. Itim’s expertise lies partly in treating these administrative details as retail performance questions.
A platform you can buy in pieces
The customer list makes more sense through that modular approach. Majestic’s requirements span consumer and trade sales. The Entertainer needs stock and orders to work across a growing retail operation. Brazil’s Assaí Atacadista signed a five-year, multi-million-pound contract in 2024 for pricing and promotions optimisation powered by Profimetrics AI. The products address related problems at different points in each business.
Itim describes a customer base of roughly 80 across 11 countries. Named relationships also include The Fragrance Shop and WHSmith. These are not interchangeable deployments: using one product does not mean a customer runs the entire platform. The company’s published examples are most useful when read at the level of the actual job purchased.
The alternatives depend on that job, too. Oracle Retail Xstore overlaps in store commerce and customer engagement; RELEX offers planning, inventory and pricing capabilities. Both make their own case for connected retail. Itim’s pitch combines a broad modular suite with implementation expertise and a store-centred operating philosophy. “Unified” alone does not settle the comparison.
Nor does choosing itim require every surrounding supplier to disappear. BetterCommerce publishes an ITIM integration for order processing. That provides a useful corrective to the idea that a platform must operate as a sealed box. Buyers still need to establish which system owns each record and which business process each connection supports.
The subscription has an implementation bill
Itim earns money from subscriptions and support, alongside licences and implementation services. Five-year agreements recur in its announcements, including 2024 renewals with Majestic and The Entertainer. Majestic’s renewal was described as multi-million-pound. A meaningful buying decision therefore involves scope, migration and ongoing service, as well as the right to use software.
The supplier has a substantial funding story of its own. Its June 2021 AIM flotation raised £8 million in new capital at 154p a share, giving it an initial market capitalisation of £48.1 million. Stated uses included software development, marketing, international expansion and £2.1 million of obligations associated with acquiring EDI Plus. The flotation valuation belongs to that date.
Commercial priorities subsequently changed. In a May 2024 interview, finance chief Ian Hayes said investor sentiment had shifted and management was concentrating on profits and cash generation. Later that year, he discussed the contribution of paid services. The lesson for a software business is unromantic: the work needed to make a subscription useful must have workable economics.
Subscriptions and support provide continuity. Services still matter.
In 2025, revenue slipped to £17.5 million and the group recorded a roughly £0.5 million pre-tax loss. Annual recurring revenue nevertheless reached £14.2 million. It spent £1.61 million on capitalised product development. Those figures describe a continuing investment effort, with cash balances ending the year at £2.6 million.
The pressure arrived through customers and project timing. Management identified delayed services revenue, redundancy costs and a bad-debt provision after Quiz Clothing entered administration in February 2026. It reduced its annual cost base by more than £1 million. A retailer’s difficulty can travel straight into its software supplier’s accounts, even when subscription income looks dependable.
AI still needs someone to act
The next product chapter is itimAIQ, announced in 2026 as a platform for deploying retail AI agents. The company describes a retail context layer between existing systems and large language models. The intended role is to make those models work with the vocabulary and relationships of retail operations. That is a product proposition, not evidence that every deployment will deliver the advertised savings.
“People are part of the value chain.”
Ali Athar · Retail Homilies
Athar’s observation supplies a sensible buying discipline. Start with a specific failure: a cancelled collection, a slow-moving line, an invoice discrepancy. Establish a baseline, identify the people who can act and test whether the new process improves the result. This is an editorial inference from the operating model, and a more useful thing to copy than a vendor’s percentage target.
The conditions matter. Local fulfilment needs stock records that can support the promise and staff with time to pick orders. Pricing recommendations need usable data and someone accountable for exceptions. A shop with few channels and little operational complexity may have less reason to buy a broad suite. Software can help coordinate work; the retailer still has to organise it.
That brings the story back to the bottle on the shelf. Itim’s opportunity is to make existing stock, people and customer relationships work together more effectively. The test happens when someone orders, a colleague finds the goods and the accounts agree. For all the platform language, the customer is waiting for a very ordinary thing: the right purchase, ready when promised.