Visualsoft wants your website and your shop to remember the same customer

A running shoe sits beneath a screen in a Shoreditch store. The interesting part is what the shop assistant can reach beyond the shelf: a catalogue of more than 90,000 SKUs. At House of SportsShoes, Visualsoft connected Shopify’s point-of-sale software to an existing ecommerce operation that did not run on Shopify. The agency says the integration took less than three weeks. For a company once known for its own online retail platform, it is a revealing piece of work.

Visualsoft now wants to own the awkward handoffs in shopping: the product saved online but forgotten at the till, the stock record that disagrees with the shelf, the customer who must introduce themselves again. Its services stretch from store design and migration to hardware installation, marketing and custom apps. The ambition is straightforward. A retailer should recognise one customer moving through its business, however many screens or counters sit in between.

A platform company picks a side

The shift involved a difficult question about Visualsoft itself. In a public account of his first 100 days as chief executive, Chris Fletcher recalled an organisation without a consistent answer to what it did. In a separate post, he described the tension between being an ecommerce agency and being an ecommerce platform. Choosing the agency direction gave Shopify a much larger role in the business.

“if you asked ten people, you’d get ten different answers.”

Chris Fletcher, CEO, on Visualsoft’s earlier identity problem

That distinction affects where the work goes. Maintaining a proprietary platform means developing the underlying shopping software. An agency using Shopify can concentrate more effort on how retailers deploy it, connect it to other systems and attract customers. Fletcher said Shopify expanded the choices available to existing clients and helped open conversations with new ones. His account makes the change sound less like surrendering a product than choosing where the company’s expertise could earn its keep.

There is considerable history behind that expertise. Co-founded by Dean Benson in 1998, Visualsoft began with online training before moving into ecommerce. A 2019 interview described early backing of £20,000 from Barclays and £80,000 from Benson’s parents. Benson led a management buyout in 2014. Private equity firm Livingbridge invested in November 2020, when it reported that the business generated £18.5 million in FY2020 revenue and served more than 1,000 customers.

The till is the test

House of SportsShoes opened in early March 2026. The 5,000-square-foot Shoreditch flagship combines gait analysis, community activity and product experiences, including RFID-enabled displays. Visualsoft’s task was to connect the new physical operation to the retailer’s established digital infrastructure. A full website migration was not the starting point. The team integrated Shopify POS with the existing non-Shopify stack.

The practical result was access to a catalogue far larger than the store could display. Staff could use the wider assortment through an “endless aisle” model, with inventory visibility connecting the shop to the online business. The project’s short timetable is striking, but the more useful detail is architectural: the retailer could add a physical sales channel while keeping its existing ecommerce environment. That gives other established online businesses a question worth asking before they commission a wholesale rebuild.

Aquatics retailer Pond Planet illustrates the smaller conveniences. Shopify’s account of its work with Visualsoft describes gift cards redeemable online and in-store, along with email capture that supports marketing across channels. The retailer can also adapt workflows for tropical fish sales without traditional inventory tracking. Fish, it turns out, are a useful reminder that a catalogue does not always behave like a warehouse full of identical boxes.

Leaving the old platform, carefully

CHO gives the pivot a particularly direct test. The Carlisle clothing and footwear retailer had worked with Visualsoft since 2014 and became the first brand to migrate from its platform to Shopify. Visualsoft’s February 2026 case study reports total ranking keywords increasing from 20,800 to 31,400 after the move. It also reports a 50 percent increase in search visibility.

The transition had moving parts. PPC spending fell by 20 percent during migration; affiliate partners were still being moved across; international targeting paused temporarily. Clicks dipped slightly at first, even as impressions improved. Those details matter because they show the marketing operation changing alongside the website. A migration touches the people and systems that send customers to the checkout, too.

The copyable lesson is to put those dependencies into the migration plan. Track the important search pages, affiliate relationships and campaign changes separately, so a traffic movement has an explanation. CHO’s keyword gains are encouraging evidence of search performance. They do not, by themselves, establish higher profit or isolate Shopify’s contribution from the agency’s work.

Thirty minutes made a difference

Visualsoft’s marketing work offers an experiment that a retailer can understand without a systems diagram. Dusk Lighting moved to Klaviyo in the second quarter of 2025. Its browse-abandonment email flow, designed to bring back people who had looked at products, was underperforming. The flow waited an hour before contacting shoppers. Visualsoft identified the timing as an opportunity to improve engagement.

At the end of September, the team shortened that delay to 30 minutes and monitored the result. The following month, the flow generated £29,905 in revenue, according to the December case study, a reported 1,770 percent month-on-month increase. The scale of that percentage depends on the starting point. The useful action was modest: question a default setting, make a targeted change and watch what happens.

Thirty minutes is a testable hypothesis for another retailer, not a universal prescription. Different products involve different decision times. And revenue attributed to an email flow should not be mistaken for an experiment proving that every sale was additional. Still, the example explains why Visualsoft sells ongoing marketing work alongside platform delivery. Launch day leaves plenty of commercial decisions unfinished.

A shop inside the agency

Visualsoft announced Shopify Premier Partner status in April 2026, followed by VS Labs in May. The product and innovation arm gives its app development and physical retail technology a dedicated home. There is also a literal shop inside the Stockton headquarters: a test environment where retailers and agencies can try the technology and give feedback using retail workflows and product data.

The products tackle recognisable tasks. Blueprint supports product customisation online and at POS. Wysh lets shoppers maintain shareable wishlists that store teams can access. Impulse addresses upselling. QuiQR Codes connects a physical scan with a digital buying journey, while SmartAlt generates image alt text. Together they show the agency preserving a software-making role within Shopify’s wider system.

In August 2026, Visualsoft announced a second place to experience that proposition: a Retail Innovation Store in Farringdon, London. Built with Shopify, LoyaltyLion, Swap and Triple Whale, it brings together POS, loyalty, returns and customer data. Visitors can explore technologies including electronic shelf labels, RFID stocktaking and interactive product experiences. A buyer can try a journey before deciding which parts belong in an actual store.

The price of joining things up

Visualsoft’s business combines agency engagements, continuing support and marketing with individual software subscriptions. Its historical Shared Success model removed upfront website build costs and linked the relationship to retailer performance. That history explains its interest in recurring commercial relationships; it should not be read as a quotation for a current Shopify project.

At the smaller end, Wysh provides a visible price ladder. Its App Store listing offers a free plan, followed by US$10, US$25 and US$100 monthly tiers. Paid plans add different wishlist allowances and POS location coverage. These are app charges, separate from the work of planning and implementing a retailer’s wider systems. A merchant should budget around the complete operating setup, including platform subscriptions, hardware, integrations, training and ongoing services.

The agency sits between buying software directly and assembling separate developers, POS installers and marketers. Its distinctive offer is responsibility across those jobs, backed by experience with specialist retailers. Its website currently claims more than 800 active clients. Published benefits include hybrid working, unlimited paid holiday and dog-friendly offices; Fletcher has also described volunteer days and expanded parental leave. These are the company’s stated policies, rather than a verdict on every employee’s experience.

The strongest fit is a retailer with enough operational complexity to make those connections valuable. A straightforward online shop may need a much smaller engagement. A tangled legacy setup needs careful scoping before anyone borrows the SportsShoes timetable. For a prospective buyer, the best opening brief is a real customer journey: save this item, find it in store, buy it, return it. Then ask Visualsoft to show where the information goes.