Shrinkage Detection + Lightspeed: Built for VP Merchandising
Most retailers discover Shrinkage problems too late. Ward delivers automated insight cards — what changed, why, and what to do — while there's still time to act. Your Merchandising team has the data. What they don't have is bandwidth to find what's buried in it.
Shrinkage Detection powered by Lightspeed Retail
Shrinkage Detection is the process of ward identifies abnormal inventory loss patterns and distinguishes between theft, damage, spoilage, and administrative error.
When connected to Lightspeed Retail, Ward reads sales transactions, inventory counts, customer profiles and enriches them with contextual signals to generate shrinkage insight cards. Ward connects via Lightspeed Retail API. OAuth-based authentication. Read-only access.
How Ward delivers Shrinkage insight cards: Ward compares expected inventory against actual counts, segments loss by cause category, and flags store-level anomalies against your estate baseline.
Key capabilities
- Cause-level shrinkage attribution
- Store-vs-estate benchmarking
- Receiving dock anomaly detection
- Pattern recognition across time
How Ward connects to Lightspeed Retail
Ward integrates with Lightspeed Retail POS for specialty and boutique retailers. In-store transaction data powers customer behavior and assortment insight cards.
Setup: Ward connects via Lightspeed Retail API. OAuth-based authentication. Read-only access.
Data Ward reads from Lightspeed
Impact metrics with Lightspeed
Data lake enrichment
Ward enriches Lightspeed data with: Sales transactions, Customer profiles, Weather & events, Competitor data, Demographic data
Your category managers are drowning in spreadsheets.
- ×Promo planning relies on last year's playbook, not this week's data
- ×Assortment reviews happen quarterly when they should happen daily
- ×Price changes are reactive, not predictive
- ×No visibility into true cannibalization across categories
- ×Vendor negotiations lack real-time sell-through evidence
- ✓Insight cards flag promo cannibalization the day it happens
- ✓Assortment gaps and whitespace opportunities surface automatically
- ✓Price elasticity shifts detected before margin erosion compounds
- ✓Category-level performance cards replace manual spreadsheet reviews
- ✓Vendor scorecards generated from actual fill rate and quality data
Retailers lose an estimated $300B+ annually to suboptimal assortment and promotional decisions. — McKinsey & Company
What a Ward insight card looks like
Store #37 showing 4.2% shrinkage vs 1.8% estate average. Pattern suggests receiving dock discrepancy, not shoplifting.
Frequently asked questions
Ward connects via Lightspeed Retail API. OAuth-based authentication. Read-only access. Data points include: Sales transactions, Inventory counts, Customer profiles, Purchase orders, Employee performance.
Your category managers are drowning in spreadsheets. Ward solves this with automated insight cards: Insight cards flag promo cannibalization the day it happens. Assortment gaps and whitespace opportunities surface automatically. Price elasticity shifts detected before margin erosion compounds.
First insight cards arrive within 48 hours of data connection. Ward needs approximately 2 weeks to establish robust baselines for your specific operation.
No. Ward sits on top of your existing stack. It is the proactive intelligence layer that watches your data continuously and delivers insight cards — so your team acts on findings instead of hunting for them.
Related solutions
Insights surface
Ward’s agents detect what changed, why it matters, and what to do about it. Every insight includes a recommended action—not just a chart to interpret.
Insights become actions
Any insight card can be turned into a tracked ticket or task. Dispatched to the right person, on the right channel—mobile push, text, or email. Not every insight needs a ticket. But when one does, it has an owner.
Your team responds
Insights get voted up or down with reasoning. Tickets get completed or rejected. Every response is a signal—Ward learns what worked, what missed, and why.
Outcomes measured
Ward evaluates real results: revenue, margin, fill rate, labor cost. Did the action actually improve the number it targeted? Measured outcomes, not assumptions.
Agents get sharper
Every vote, every completed ticket, every measured outcome feeds back in. Ward learns from your team’s judgment and real-world results. Each cycle sharpens the next. Then it starts again.
See what shrinkage problems Ward catches.
Root causes, not just alerts. See it on your data.
Find out what your data has been hiding.
Tell us about your operation. We’ll show you the problems Ward catches — and the ones your current tools miss.