Fluent Retail: The Melbourne AI Platform Powering Omnichannel Commerce for Australian Retailers
Founded: 2013 | HQ: Melbourne, VIC | Sector: Retail Tech / AI / Omnichannel Commerce
What Is Fluent Commerce?
Fluent Commerce (formerly Fluent Retail) is a Melbourne-based cloud platform that solves one of retail’s hardest problems: unified inventory and order management across physical stores, online channels, and distribution centres. For retailers selling through multiple channels — website, app, marketplace, physical store — knowing what stock is where and fulfilling orders from the right location is genuinely complex. Fluent’s platform handles this with AI-powered intelligence.
The Omnichannel Problem
When a customer orders online and wants to pick up in store, or a store associate needs to ship a product from another location because the local store is out of stock, the underlying logistics require sophisticated real-time inventory visibility and intelligent order routing. Doing this manually — or with legacy ERP systems — is slow, error-prone, and expensive. Fluent’s platform automates and optimises the entire process.
How AI Powers Fluent
Fluent’s AI capabilities focus on order routing intelligence — automatically selecting the optimal fulfilment location for each order based on stock availability, shipping cost, delivery time, and store capacity. Machine learning improves these routing decisions over time, learning from historical order patterns to better predict where stock will be needed and when.
AI-powered inventory positioning helps retailers distribute stock more intelligently across their network — reducing the imbalances that lead to some stores being overstocked while others run out.
Australian Retailers Using Fluent
Fluent’s platform is used by some of Australia’s most recognised retailers and has expanded internationally to serve major global brands. The company’s growth reflects the complexity of modern retail — where customers expect seamless experiences across channels that most retailers’ legacy systems simply weren’t built to support.
Why It Matters for Small Retailers
While Fluent primarily serves enterprise retailers, their technology signals where the industry is heading. Australian small retailers navigating the shift to omnichannel commerce — selling on Shopify, at a physical location, and on marketplaces simultaneously — face the same inventory visibility and fulfilment challenges at smaller scale. Understanding how leading retailers solve these problems with AI is useful context for any retailer’s technology strategy.
Sources and Further Reading
📋 Browse all Australian AI company profiles: Australian AI Companies: The Complete Guide by Industry (2026) →
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