The Last Straw

The Last Straw is a home decor and gift store: silk florals, lighting, home accents, a ladies boutique, Amish-built outdoor furniture, and a Christmas and fall collection that turns over every year. It sells in store and ships across the United States.

We started with the store in 2022 on the marketing side: Google Shopping and Search campaigns, SEO, and the Shopify site itself on our website-as-a-service plan. That part was working. Search and ads had become the main source of online orders.

Then came the harder job. The shop runs its floor on Lightspeed, and its website on Shopify. Those two systems do not talk to each other on their own. A seasonal catalogue makes it worse: products come and go every few months, so the mismatch never stops. Lightspeed holds products in a matrix. Shopify holds them as products and variants. The two structures are completely different, and there is no button that turns one into the other.

Without a link between them, every sale at the counter leaves the website a step behind. A wreath sold on Saturday is still for sale online on Sunday. A lamp that just arrived is on the shelf but not on the site. And the ads we run keep sending shoppers to products that may or may not be there.

So the real job was to match every product between Lightspeed and Shopify, build a sync that keeps stock right in both places, and do it without pausing the campaigns that were already bringing in the orders.

We started with the catalogue. Before syncing anything, we worked out how each piece of the Lightspeed matrix maps onto Shopify's products and variants, then matched every product between the two systems one to one. Where the two did not line up, we fixed them by hand rather than let a bad match slip through.

With every product matched, we built a custom bridge connector between Lightspeed and Shopify. A sale at the counter updates the stock online within minutes. An online order updates the stock in the POS. Staff keep working in the system they know, and nobody re-enters inventory twice. We maintain the bridge as the seasons turn, so new arrivals stay matched as they come in.

Around the bridge, the rest of the engagement carried on. We run the Shopify site and re-merchandise it each season, so the homepage leads with what is selling now. The SEO work targets the product searches that matter. And the ads never paused: Google Shopping and Performance Max carry the catalogue to shoppers who are ready to buy, with Meta campaigns layered in around the holidays, now landing on products whose stock is right.

The store has grown steadily since tracking began in Google Analytics. Comparing May to December 2025 with the same eight months in 2024:

• Online revenue: up 34%.
• Online orders: up 38%.
• November 2025: the best month on record, with 234 online orders.
• Inventory: one catalogue, synced between Lightspeed and Shopify and maintained since.

Search is what drives it. From May 2025 to September 2026, 79% of online revenue came from the channels we manage: Google ads and organic search combined. September 2026 closed with 50% more online orders than September 2025.