Selling precious metals at the speed of the market.
Based in Pinehurst, North Carolina, Pinehurst Coins is a precious metals and rare coin retailer built on modern graded coins: pieces from roughly 1986 to the present, certified by NGC and PCGS, the industry's two leading grading services. The company is also a major bullion retailer, selling across its own site at pinehurstcoins.com, eBay (where they’ve seen 60% YoY revenue growth), and Walmart Marketplace.
Selling commodities online comes with a challenge most retailers never face. The price of a large share of the catalog moves with the live market, so as gold and silver spot prices change minute to minute, Pinehurst Coins has to update its pricing to match across every channel, all at once.
“A significant portion of our inventory updates with the market,” said Tal Sneed, Vice President of Ecommerce at Pinehurst Coins. “As the market for gold and silver changes by the minute, we update our pricing accordingly. That created some unique challenges in having a system that could adapt to that without putting a strain on our servers.”
Commodity margins leave little room for error. “Our customers are very price sensitive,” Sneed said. “So we pursue technology at every opportunity where we know it's going to be worth the ROI.”
Our overall view of technology has always been to adopt it as quickly as possible within economic means. ”
Why Pinehurst Coins chose Feedonomics.
As Pinehurst Coins migrated its ecommerce sites from Magento to WooCommerce, it needed an integration that could keep its two biggest external marketplaces, eBay and Walmart, in sync at scale. The company's existing partner couldn't keep up.
“The timely updating of inventory, product data, and pricing just wasn't ideal,” Sneed said. “Products weren't coming down when we ran out of inventory, so we were selling items we didn't have. And pricing wasn't going up quickly enough, so we lost margin on products we could have made more on.”
Older integrations also created a performance problem of their own, pushing the entire catalog on every update, slowing the website, and degrading the internal reporting apps built on the same data.
Two capabilities won the team over. The first was the flexibility of Feedonomics transformers. “We were able to change product descriptions from what's on our website to make them different for each individual platform,” Sneed said. “That technology was really intriguing to us.”
The second was control over how, and how often, data moved. “We could either push information to Feedonomics or pull it down, and have Feedonomics do the same,” Sneed said. "We had more granular control over how the exchange of data was working, without too much strain on our internal resources. That was a big driver for us.”
Rather than pushing everything all the time, we control the cadence of when the data exchanges take place. That was a big feature for us.”
Turning a historic order surge into a solved problem.
That control proved its worth during the recent gold and silver surge. With both metals hitting all-time highs and silver nearly doubling year over year, Pinehurst Coins saw an extraordinary rush of orders: 5,000 to 6,000 in a single day, sustained for days at a time.
The spike exposed a blind spot. Like many retailers, Pinehurst Coins had been broadcasting the same inventory count to every channel. “If I had 20 in my inventory system, I was sending 20 to my website, 20 to eBay, and 20 to Walmart,” Sneed said. “Previously that was fine. But during the surge, one person would open all three platforms and buy all 20 of a product across every channel at the same time.” The result was overselling at scale, and customers who couldn't get what they ordered.
The Feedonomics rules engine gave the team a way to allocate inventory deliberately rather than expose all of it everywhere. “We could say, if we have this amount of inventory, send this much to this platform — it's our better-selling channel — and this much to the others,” Sneed said. As stock dropped to set thresholds, the rules automatically narrowed distribution to fewer channels. “It's more of an asset now than it was a liability.”
That was a blind spot for us. Now inventory allocation across platforms is something we can actually use to our advantage. ”
Measurable growth across marketplaces.
With data flowing accurately and on the cadence the business needs, Pinehurst Coins has expanded aggressively, most dramatically on Walmart Marketplace. In a published case study, Walmart credited the partnership with 70% year-over-year sales growth and a 34% increase in orders. Momentum has only accelerated. After launching with roughly 1,200 SKUs, the company now averages around 4,800.
“On Walmart, we're on pace for a 210% year-over-year revenue increase, and I attribute that greatly to a larger product mix being on the platform,” Sneed said. On eBay, more timely pricing and the ability to keep products live longer have driven roughly 60% year-over-year revenue growth.
“Walmart helps us reach a broader audience,” Sneed told Walmart Marketplace. “Feedonomics lets us integrate our systems and simplify product publishing, inventory, and order management.”
The operational relief has been just as meaningful. “Before Feedonomics, I was personally spending an hour and a half to two hours a day just verifying that pricing and inventory were correct,” Sneed said. “Now I don't think about it at all.” He estimates the platform saves his development team a comparable 5 to 10 hours a week, now spent building new features across the company's other applications.
It's been a stress reliever. Rather than focusing on tedious details, I'm actually able to look forward and do real strategic planning for the ecommerce side of our business.”
A partnership built on responsive service.
Sneed credits much of the success to the people behind the platform, particularly during onboarding. “I really can't say enough about how attentive the implementation team was in getting us on board,” he said. “Getting the product mix and the product data correct, in the way you want it, is what's key to us.”
Ongoing support has held to the same standard. “I've never waited more than an hour or an hour and a half for a response,” Sneed said. “Most of the issues we run into now are platform-related, not Feedonomics-related.”
What's next for Pinehurst Coins.
With the foundation in place, Pinehurst Coins is focused on putting its products in front of as many buyers as possible. The team is onboarding an additional Walmart store for another brand it owns, and it has accepted an invitation from TikTok Shop, which is bringing prominent bullion companies onto its platform. Whatnot and Target are also on the roadmap.
“I like to expose our products to as large an audience as possible,“ Sneed said. “Feedonomics is going to let us integrate with all of those channels too.”
For a business operating on razor-thin margins in one of retail's most volatile markets, the ability to expand confidently, without adding manual overhead or risking the customer experience, is exactly the point.
