Building a retail media platform from scratch

Executive summary: Development of a custom ad space sales management platform

01 Client

A consultancy based in Central Europe acting as a strategic partner for eCommerce brands entering retail networks. The company helps brands answer the question of whether retail expansion makes sense for them — and if so, takes responsibility for the result, combining audit, strategy, sales, marketing, and retail readiness in a single cooperation model.

02 The core challenge

The client's business is built on selling advertising space inside partner stores — banners, screens, hangers, displays, end-caps. With dozens of partners, hundreds of locations, and many different sub-product types in each location, the entire offering, availability, and pricing logic was being managed outside any dedicated system. The lack of a central tool slowed down quoting, made it hard to track which spaces were actually free at a given moment, and limited the client's ability to scale the sales operation beyond a small team.

03 Solution delivered

Pretius designed and built a custom web application based on Java that consolidates the full lifecycle of an advertising campaign in one place: from defining the partner network, mapping every wall, screen, and rack inside a store, through configuring campaigns and reservations, all the way to generating offers and orders. The system is being delivered in an MVP-first model, with a clear roadmap of post-MVP modules (online surface support, screen content monitoring, commission calculation for sales reps).

Key outcomes:

A single source of truth for advertising inventory:
Every partner, location, product and sub-product is mapped in one place, with status, quantity, hot/cold zone information, and base price.
Faster, repeatable campaign creation:
A step-by-step wizard, automatically generated campaign codes, and on-the-fly cost calculation replace ad-hoc spreadsheets.

Reservation control with audit trail:
Every campaign has an owner, audit logs (who, when, what), expiring-reservation alerts, and the ability to resume an expired reservation when the resource is still available.
A platform ready for growth, not just for today:
Built from day one to absorb new product categories, online inventory, screen content management, telesales, and a partner/client self-service portal, without rebuilding the foundations.

Client background

The client helps eCommerce brands decide whether entering retail networks is the right move at all — and only then, if the business has potential, takes ownership of the financial, product, operational, and marketing analysis required to make it happen. The cooperation model is built around three steps: a 30-minute consultation, a decision-making audit, and finally a strategic partnership leading the brand into retail.

Behind that consultancy layer sits a commercial reality the client needed to operationalize: their team brokers and resells advertising space across a network of retail partners. Each partner runs anywhere from a handful to dozens of physical stores, and each store contains multiple advertising surfaces — large LED screens, interactive kiosks, end-of-aisle banners, shelf hangers, entrance walls, and many more. The same physical product (for example, a 55-inch LED screen) can exist in different variants, different quantities per location, and in either hot or cold zones of the store.

For the client, having a structured digital twin of that inventory — and a fast, repeatable way to package it into campaigns — is the difference between selling deal-by-deal and building a scalable retail media business.

The business challenge: Turning a fast-growing media sales operation into a system

Before the project started, the client was running its entire retail media sales motion on a combination of spreadsheets, ad-hoc tools, and external software for offer distribution.

That setup created several concrete pain points:

No reliable view of space availability:
When a client asked whether a specific product (e.g. a banner near the entrance) was free in 30 stores of a given partner for a given month, answering that question required manual checks. The lack of a single inventory record made it easy to double-book a surface or to miss an opportunity.

Slow, inconsistent campaign creation:
Each new campaign was assembled by hand — picking products, applying discounts, calculating the total cost, and drafting an offer. There was no standard campaign code, no enforced data structure, no automatic cost calculation. Two salespeople preparing similar campaigns could end up with two very different documents.

Limited room to grow the team:
The client plans to scale its sales force up. Without an internal system, every new hire would have to learn an undocumented, person-dependent process — and the company would have no way to consistently track who created what, when, and for which client.

No foundation for the next business steps:
The client has a clear roadmap beyond the current offering: handling online advertising space, plugging into clients' systems to read real-time availability, monitoring screen content, generating offers directly from the platform, and eventually calculating sales-rep commissions. None of that was feasible on the existing tooling.

The solution: A purpose-built platform designed around the business, not a generic CRM template

After two structured discovery workshops with the client, Pretius defined a phased product strategy: ship a tightly scoped MVP that covers the full offline-advertising sales loop end-to-end, then evolve the platform module by module toward the wider business vision.

The project was delivered in the Agile methodology, with a cross-functional Pretius team (business analyst, software developers, QA) scaled to the scope and a defined post-MVP roadmap shared between Pretius and the client.

The MVP was built around five tightly connected pillars:

01 Partner & location management

Every retail partner is added once and managed centrally — base data, commission split between the client and the partner, status, description, and a full hierarchy of locations beneath them. Each location carries its own metadata: address, opening hours, size category (XS / S / M / L / XL — important because some campaigns are sold exclusively to XL stores), description, and a price markup on top of the base sub-product price.

02 Product & sub-product catalog with hot/cold zoning

A product (e.g., "entrance wall") can be broken down into the smallest sellable sub-products (e.g., individual banner slots, specific hanger rows). For each sub-product, the system tracks quantity per location, hot/cold zone classification, base price, status, and validity dates. The same physical product can carry different names in different partner contexts — so the dictionary distinguishes between global definitions and partner-specific overrides, and supports file-based specifications attached to each product.

03 A step-by-step campaign wizard

Campaign creation is the heart of the system, and it has been redesigned from a single overloaded modal into a guided multi-step flow:

automatically generated campaign codes for consistency across the team,
a campaign owner assigned on creation, with audit logs capturing every change,
date-driven availability filtering — once a campaign window is chosen, the system surfaces which products are available, partially available, or fully booked,
support for campaign-level discounts on top of sub-product-level pricing,
hot/cold counters showing the mix being assembled,
two save paths — "save as draft" and "reserve & generate offer plus order" — with the offer and order automatically emailed to the user who created the campaign.

04 Reservations with built-in safety nets

Reservations are not just records — they are first-class entities with expiration dates, alerts on the campaign details screen when expiry is approaching, and a one-click resume path when a reservation has lapsed but the underlying inventory is still free. Filters by date and owner on the campaign list make it easy to manage a pipeline across the full sales team.

05 Roles, dashboards & reporting

Three roles — Administrator, Partner Editor, Partner Viewer — with partner-scoped permissions. A dashboard surfaces the metrics that the sales team actually opens the app to see: monthly campaign value (filterable by partner), space occupancy per partner, expiring reservations, and active partner count. A reporting module exports XLSX / CSV summaries for finance and management.

Technologies powering the transformation

01 Java

A mature, enterprise-grade backend technology. The client deliberately chose Java over a low-code alternative to retain maximum control over how the platform evolves long-term, and to avoid platform lock-in for a system that is meant to grow well beyond MVP.

02 Modern web frontend

A web-based admin and partner interface designed around the core daily workflow of the client's team: dashboards, campaign creation wizards, partner and location management, and product catalogs.

03 File-based data ingestion

CSV / Excel import for partner, location, and product data, with an API layer planned for later integrations, once core processes are stable.

Measured outcomes and business impact

The platform was built to deliver value on multiple levels — operational, commercial, and strategic.

One inventory, one truth

Every partner, location, product, and sub-product lives in a single structured catalog instead of in scattered spreadsheets — eliminating double bookings and giving the sales team an instant answer on what is actually for sale.

Faster campaign turnaround

A step-by-step wizard, auto-generated codes, automatic cost calculation, and one-click offer & order generation collapse the time between a client request and a sent quote.

A team that can scale

With consistent processes, audit logs, and owner-based filtering, the client can grow its sales team without losing visibility over who is doing what.

Differentiated pricing under control

Partner-level commission, location-level markups, sub-product base price, and campaign-level discounts all coexist cleanly in one pricing engine.

Hot/cold awareness baked in

Sales reps see in real time how many hot vs. cold sub-products a given campaign contains — a metric directly tied to commercial outcomes.

A platform ready for what's next

Online inventory, screen content monitoring, in-system offer dispatch, commission calculation for sales reps, telesales support, and a client-facing portal are already mapped out as next steps — and the architecture is being designed to absorb them.

Conclusion

This project shows that even a young, fast-moving consultancy can benefit dramatically from a custom-built platform — provided the scope is right.

The client did not need an off-the-shelf CRM or a generic booking tool. They needed a system that understands their specific domain: partner store networks, multi-zone retail surfaces, hot/cold pricing, partner-specific naming, campaign reservations, and the very practical reality of growing a retail media sales business. By choosing Java for the long term and pairing it with a disciplined MVP-first delivery approach, the client and Pretius are building a foundation that solves today's sales-operation pains and is ready to support tomorrow's expansion into online inventory, screen content management, and a fully self-service partner and client experience.

How Pretius helped a retail expansion consultancy digitize the sales of offline advertising space

Company

Country

Industry

System

Executive summary: Development of a custom ad space sales management platform

01

Client

02

The core challenge

03

Solution delivered

Key outcomes:

Client background

The business challenge: Turning a fast-growing media sales operation into a system

Before the project started, the client was running its entire retail media sales motion on a combination of spreadsheets, ad-hoc tools, and external software for offer distribution.

That setup created several concrete pain points:

The solution: A purpose-built platform designed around the business, not a generic CRM template

The MVP was built around five tightly connected pillars:

01

Partner & location management

02

Product & sub-product catalog with hot/cold zoning

03

A step-by-step campaign wizard

04

Reservations with built-in safety nets

05

Roles, dashboards & reporting

Technologies powering the transformation

01

Java

02

Modern web frontend

03

File-based data ingestion

Measured outcomes and business impact

The platform was built to deliver value on multiple levels — operational, commercial, and strategic.

One inventory, one truth

Faster campaign turnaround

A team that can scale

Differentiated pricing under control

Hot/cold awareness baked in

A platform ready for what's next

Conclusion

This project shows that even a young, fast-moving consultancy can benefit dramatically from a custom-built platform — provided the scope is right.

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