Overview
For Victoria’s Secret, keeping hundreds of stores supplied with fixtures, marketing materials, packaging, and operational supplies is a mission-critical B2B operation. Every week, more than 800 locations depend on timely ordering to support promotions, floor sets, and day-to-day operations.
For years, that ordering ran on a platform owned and operated by the retailer’s fulfillment partner, bundled together with warehousing and fulfillment in a single offering. Convenient at first, the arrangement eventually capped how far the retailer could customize workflows, improve usability, and respond to its own changing needs.
Victoria’s Secret replaced that bundled system with a purpose-built stack: Shopify for the ordering experience and catalog structure, and Deck Commerce for order management and fulfillment. The result is a modern, self-service platform that the retailer’s own procurement team operates, without standing up a dedicated internal IT effort.
The Challenge: A Platform They Didn’t Own
The previous ordering platform belonged to the fulfillment partner rather than Victoria’s Secret. It worked, but the ownership model created a chain of operational limits:
Rather than letting stores quickly order what they needed, the system often pushed associates back to corporate just to locate a product. As one operations leader put it:
“If they couldn’t find something, they had to email our field support team, who then had to investigate and respond back. Something that should have taken seconds could take days.”
— Operations leader
The cost showed up as wasted labor, slower promotional execution, and mounting frustration across the organization.
Why Change: An Ownership Problem
Victoria’s Secret came to see that the deeper problem sat beneath the user experience. Because the fulfillment partner owned the technology, the retailer was effectively locked in. Even if service slipped or costs climbed, switching vendors meant replacing fulfillment operations and the ordering platform at the same time.
What the organization wanted was to own the technology powering its B2B operations, while keeping the freedom to evolve its fulfillment strategy on its own terms.
The Solution: Shopify + Deck Commerce
Victoria’s Secret built its new ordering experience on Shopify and Deck Commerce. A Shopify-focused systems integrator built the customizations that turned Shopify, ordinarily a direct-to-consumer storefront, into a B2B ordering platform tailored to their rules.
Shopify provides the product and order structure and the buying experience that store users see, adapted to their B2B requirements with:
Deck Commerce sits behind Shopify as the order management and fulfillment engine, orchestrating each order from placement through fulfillment. Shopify runs the storefront and the business rules; Deck runs the orchestration and fulfillment underneath it.
The pairing is unusual enough that, to the team’s knowledge, this is a completely unique Shopify internal B2B supply use case. What makes it work is the clean division of labor between the two platforms, configured once to the retailer’s business rules and then largely left to run.
Standing It Up Without Internal IT
One detail sets this project apart. The team that owns the platform is a procurement team, not an IT organization. They stood up and now run a custom B2B ordering system for hundreds of stores without allocating dedicated internal IT resources, relying instead on their build partner and ongoing support from Deck.
That support has defined the experience. The team pointed to a partnership where Deck often “sees mistakes before they happen,” catching issues before they reach stores. The platform’s stability bears this out: in three years of production, the retailer has not received a system-error notification beyond routine open-order handling.
What Changed
Self-service order visibility
Investigating an order once meant contacting the fulfillment provider and waiting for someone to research it. Now every member of the operations team can immediately see order status, exceptions, processing errors, and fulfillment progress. Issues that used to take days are resolved in the moment.
Ordering that any store employee can do
The old interface required specially trained associates. The new one lets virtually any store employee find and order supplies. Store feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with no appetite to return to the old system. Because products are now easy to find, stores order what they actually need instead of abandoning searches when inventory couldn’t be located.
Precise control by store, season, and product
Using the platform’s per-store controls, Victoria’s Secret configures store-specific assortments, seasonal availability, purchase and quantity limits, and product visibility by location. Promotional materials meant for a handful of stores can be shown only to those locations. The controls keep stores ordering the right products, in the right quantities, at the right time. As they explained:
“Every store is different. A store in Manhattan doesn’t need the same things as a store in Idaho.”
— Operations Leader
Less administrative work
Corporate teams now manage the catalog themselves: adding and retiring SKUs, uploading images, updating descriptions, configuring case packs, and controlling user access, all without emailing the fulfillment partner. With roughly 1,100 active SKUs and churn of about 25 new and 30 retired each month, self-service management removes a steady stream of manual requests and returns hundreds of administrative hours a year.
International reach
Beyond its domestic store base, the platform handles more than 900 international orders a year through franchise workflows, extending the same controlled ordering model across borders.
The Business Case
The clearest hard number comes from store-level ordering time. The retailer estimates the new experience saves about 30 minutes per store each week. Across 800+ stores ordering weekly, that is roughly 20,800 labor hours recovered per year.
Valued at a fully loaded hourly rate for the store staff who place orders, those hours translate to an estimated $450,000 to $650,000 per year in recovered labor, with a base case near $560,000. The figure is a model built on stated assumptions rather than a measured saving, and it moves with who does the ordering and how stores are staffed. Sitting on top of it are further gains that are harder to price but real: administrative hours returned to corporate through self-service catalog management, reduced training and key-person dependency now that any employee can order, and the strategic value of no longer being locked to a single fulfillment vendor.
Modeled from 800 stores, 52 weeks, 30 minutes per store per week, and a fully loaded store labor rate anchored to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics May 2025 wage data. Full assumptions and sensitivity ranges are documented in the accompanying ROI model.
Business Impact at a Glance
Since moving to Shopify and Deck Commerce, Victoria's Secret has achieved:
Looking Forward
For Victoria’s Secret, modernizing store supply ordering came down to regaining operational control. By separating the ordering technology from fulfillment services, they can adapt as its business evolves while giving both stores and corporate teams a faster, easier, and more configurable platform. As their operations leader summarized:
“Our goal was to move toward technology that we could self-manage, operate, and customize to our business—so we weren’t shackled to a vendor’s technology or their limitations.”
— Operations leader