Q&A with Josh Barling, Managing Director of Retail & Hospitality, ClearCourse
Josh has built his career in retail with a strong focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences. He began in ecommerce during the early days of the iPad, witnessing the rapid evolution of the sector driven by platforms like Amazon.
After selling his ecommerce business, Sellerdeck, to ClearCourse in 2022, he has broadened his scope by leading and collaborating with a diverse portfolio of retail brands across the group. Taking real pride in empowering people, Josh is dedicated to supporting brand leaders, driving growth for SMEs, and creating opportunities for talented individuals to shape the future of ClearCourse.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
Prior to joining ClearCourse, I was CEO of Sellerdeck, a platform that scales ecommerce businesses with over £11 billion transacted through its platforms. My father founded Sellerdeck, and after occasionally helping him out with tasks like packing boxes, I eventually joined the company full time in earnest in 2009. I worked through multiple roles before stepping into the CEO role in 2017. I then led Sellerdeck to its sale to ClearCourse in 2022. This has supercharged its growth, as it’s now able to leverage embedded payments and integration with a diverse set of business growth solutions to add value to its customers.
Subscribe to TRBI began my career in ecommerce at an incredibly exciting time – it was during the early days of the iPad – just as the ecommerce boom was taking off. I had the chance to witness up close the rapid evolution of the sector driven by platforms like Amazon. It was a period defined by the sheer pace of innovation, where consumer behaviour changed almost overnight due to new technology enabling them to shop from the comfort of their sofas.
In my current role leading ClearCourse’s Retail & Hospitality businesses, I feel we’re at another key juncture in terms of the speed of change within ecommerce. This time, it’s driven by two major forces: AI has supercharged what’s possible, while the changing nature of customer experience and expectations is fuelling this accelerated pace of transformation. Sector-specific software and payments solutions enable retailers to get ahead of these – not only enhancing customer experiences, but also optimising back office operations. As AI makes the pace of change much quicker, it’s essential that we are supporting retailers with the solutions they need to stay ahead.
What does your company do? / What is your USP?
ClearCourse is a leading group of sector-specific software and embedded payments solutions built specifically for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Our mission-critical software and embedded business growth solutions allow businesses to run day to day operations smoothly and reach more customers. We’re determined to be a leading engine powering small and medium businesses across the UK and beyond.
Our strength lies in supporting our retail customers to benefit from an omnichannel experience that’s tailored specifically for their industry. Instead of a one-size-fits-all retail solution, we provide specialist retail systems that deliver great experiences through an integrated suite of tools – including EPOS, ecommerce, loyalty, analytics, and embedded payments. This unified approach ensures that independent retailers have access to the same technological advantages as larger enterprises, allowing them to compete effectively in a competitive marketplace.
What’s special about the platform and your approach?
Our software is built by people with deep industry knowledge so that it’s tailored to the niche needs and workflows of specific industries – providing our clients with a way to reach more customers, enhance customer experience and loyalty, and grow their business. Our team understands the day-to-day challenges retailers face, and how these differ across specific industries. For example, while retailers face a lot of similar challenges, there are differences between department stores and farm shops, or supermarkets and flooring stores. Our software accounts for this and builds accordingly – as retailers should not have to settle for one-size-fits all for their businesses.
The real power of this tailored approach is the outcome it delivers for our clients, giving them time back in their day. It can also help them identify clear opportunities for growth by analysing their existing data and providing metrics on how their business is performing. This ultimately enables them to compete effectively with the scale and resources of bigger retailers – and focus on the important things like delivering the best for their customers.
What advantage does it add?
Simply put, our sector-specific software and embedded payment solutions allow our clients to operate their business from one centralised place, which opens up a whole host of benefits.
Ultimately, it means they can operate quickly and efficiently. Speed is often critical in a retail environment, so being able to have control and visibility over their stock and business operations can give retailers a vital edge when it comes to providing faster services to customers. Our software can support with management of their stock and business, while our embedded payment solutions mean they can benefit from payments that sync directly with transactions and features built specifically to solve some of the most time-consuming or error-prone activities, such as order balance payment and delivery scheduling. This means easier reporting and a focus on what’s important – customer experience.
We also offer platforms to build and manage high-converting online stores, ensuring data is consistently synchronised with in-store operations. We have in-built ecommerce and ecommerce integrations available internally that allow businesses to get selling online as quickly as possible, offering a dedicated web development team that rapidly builds high-quality websites that can help maximise online sales.
Critically, our integrated loyalty apps help our clients maintain and improve customer relationships and help retailers generate repeat business by tracking customer activity data to power loyalty schemes and targeted marketing initiatives, stimulating growth and repeat purchases.
How does a product/service implementation actually look like and how do you measure success?
A great way to explain product implementation is through an example, such as the integration between Swan’s retail management platforms and our Sellerdeck ecommerce solution. The key focus is on making day-to-day management simpler, with sales features that allow retailers to focus on winning more customers.
The technology eliminates the distinction between ‘in-store sales’ and ‘online sales’. They do this by creating a single, unified data source – the ecommerce website’s product database is updated through Swan’s platform, meaning a retailer only has one place to add or amend products, stock and pricing.
This unified approach then links loyalty schemes, so customers buying online can redeem points in-store, and vice versa. The core idea is that people buy from your brand, not your channel, so you need to present your brand consistently wherever they choose to shop.
Ultimately, we measure success by achieving the commercial goals of the customer, and this usually involves clear revenue growth.
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like? Can you share a case study with us?
Retailers are using our software to achieve a key competitive advantage – efficiency that frees up capital and time. Our integrated retail management software and embedded payment solutions allow our clients to operate their business from one centralised place, which is critical for competing in a fiercely competitive landscape.
A great example of this in action is Petmania, a successful retailer with 17 physical branches, and a growing web store. Before working with us, Petmania faced a major challenge – their ecommerce orders were managed separately from their internal systems. This lack of integration between their web orders and the courier portal meant staff were spending up to seven hours a week cutting and pasting order data between two different software platforms. This was not only time-consuming but led to occasional human errors with addresses, increasing the workload on the customer services team and making the entire operation unsustainable as their online order volume grew.
When Petmania turned to us, our primary objective was to create a seamless, end-to-end integration that would help them eliminate wasted time and deliver consistent and high-quality customer service. Through an integration of Sellerdeck and Swan, we created a seamless solution which automatically booked web orders with the courier while simultaneously processing the data, printing labels and packing slips, and automatically updating the order with the courier tracking number.
Are there other companies you partner with?
We recognise that no single platform can be everything for everyone, which is why we strategically integrate with industry-specific solutions that help us to provide better, tailored solutions to targeted problems. At ClearCourse, we are able to offer best-in-class solutions that range from data validation, to gift vouchers and mobile messaging systems. This blended approach ensures our customers always have the right technology to grow their business.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2026 / What challenges are retailers facing in 2025?
The retail sector is facing a perfect storm of challenges in the UK: national insurance hikes, national minimum wage rises, and reduced business rate relief, to name a few. Over 13,000 retail stores permanently shut last year and the pressure on bricks and mortar premises has never been greater. Data shows whilst retail sales enjoyed a slight boost over the summer, this wasn’t enough to cover costs for many businesses. With this operating landscape, technology and software solutions become not just a defence against economic headwinds, but the most powerful tool to differentiate themselves from bigger corporate chains, focusing on the importance of human connection and customer loyalty.
Choosing the right tools with clear consumer benefits, as well as a positive impact on the bottom line, is critical. This might mean delivering a more personalised experience to consumers – by using technology that supports loyalty programs, meaning retailers can share targeted products to consumers based on past spending habits during promotional moments like Black Friday. Simultaneously, by tracking consumer spending habits like this, retailers can identify demand peaks and make informed decisions about inventory management. This might mean using AI to help generate more revenue from promotional moments, like Black Friday, or even using weather data and customer trends to identify demand peaks and inform inventory or stock management.
How will you address these challenges and turn them into successes?
Our focus will remain squarely on building excellent software for businesses who want to spend less time on operations and more time on customers, growth, and the work they love. We want to put our sector-specific software, embedded payments and business growth tools into the hands of more SMEs, to free up their day so they can get back to running their businesses.
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
We’re determined to continue building the best solutions to help SMEs across the country thrive and navigate the challenges of competition, rising costs and changes in how and where consumers are choosing to spend their money.
Any final thoughts?
To find out how ClearCourse can help your retail operation, visit them online here
