Where the money actually leaks
It rarely shows up as one big loss. It shows up as a slightly late delivery that costs a sale, a purchase order re-keyed manually with a typo, a reorder placed two days later than it should have been, a merchant invoice paid twice because two people processed it separately.
None of these look serious individually. Across a year, across hundreds of SKUs and dozens of merchants, they add up to a meaningful percentage of revenue that simply evaporates.
Fragmentation is the common thread
Almost every leak traces back to the same root cause: the supply chain runs across disconnected tools — a spreadsheet for inventory, WhatsApp for merchant orders, a separate app for delivery tracking, and a bank app for payments. Every handoff between those tools is a place where information gets lost or delayed.
The fix is fewer handoffs, not more discipline
The instinct is often to add more checklists and more discipline. The more durable fix is to reduce the number of separate systems a single order has to pass through — connecting sourcing, inventory, procurement, fulfillment, and payments into one operating system so information does not have to be re-entered at every step.