Every event organiser eventually faces the same question. How do you build a retail operation that can serve hundreds of thousands of fans across dozens of sites, much of it temporary, without a single till going down at the worst possible moment. There is no single piece of technology that answers that question. The answer is a planning model, a platform and an on-site team that all move at the same pace as the event itself.
BC4 has built and run that model at some of the biggest live events in the world, including the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Rugby World Cup and the Ryder Cup. This post sets out the practical approach behind that work, from the technology decisions made months before doors open to the on-site support that keeps everything running once the crowds arrive.
Permanent retail has the luxury of time. A new store opens once, teething problems get ironed out over weeks, and staff build up experience across seasons. A major event compresses all of that into days. Sites open and close on a fixed date that cannot move, footfall arrives in enormous peaks rather than a steady curve, and a large share of the workforce is seasonal and has never used the system before.
On top of that, an event retail estate is rarely one type of site. A tournament like Paris 2024 or a Rugby World Cup involves megastores, kiosks, pop-ups, hospitality outlets and eCommerce, often spread across multiple cities and venues rather than one location. Connectivity at temporary sites cannot always be relied on. Staff training has to happen in days rather than months. None of this is an excuse for downtime, because for the fan in front of the till, a queue caused by a system fault is the same as a queue caused by anything else.
Megastores, kiosks, pop-ups and eCommerce need to run on the same underlying dataset rather than a patchwork of separate systems. BC4 builds this on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and LS Central, so stock, pricing, promotions and sales all sit in one place regardless of which channel a fan buys through. When finance and operations can see true stock and true sales in real time, decisions on the day get made in minutes instead of being discovered after the event has finished.
Every site on the estate gets scoped individually. A megastore needs different hardware, staffing and stock depth to a pop-up kiosk outside a fan zone. Deciding this early, rather than treating every site as a smaller version of the same template, is what keeps hardware and stock allocation realistic when the event goes live.
High-pressure fixtures need systems that can queue-bust, sync promotional pricing instantly, and keep trading if connectivity drops. Offline capability at temporary sites is not an optional extra for an event environment. It is the difference between a site that keeps serving fans through a connectivity blip and one that grinds to a halt in front of a queue.
Seasonal staff need to be productive from day one, which means training has to be simple enough to deliver in hours rather than weeks. On event days themselves, that training is backed by live monitoring, rapid incident response and a team that stays until the last customer has been served. BC4 calls this HyperCare, and it is the layer that turns a well-built system into a retail operation that survives contact with a live crowd.
At the Paris 2024 Games, BC4 supported Legends International across 600 point of sale systems in 17 cities, processing more than 270,000 transactions at peak daily volume with zero downtime. That scale only works because every site, from a small kiosk to a flagship store, shared the same Business Central and LS Central dataset, and because the support model was built around HyperCare from the outset rather than added on afterwards.
"BC4's agile approach and HyperCare support ensured smooth and reliable retail operations throughout the Paris 2024 Games, adapting seamlessly to the event's demands" - Director of Retail France, Legends International
Read the fuller story in the Paris 2024 case study.
The Rugby World Cup and the Ryder Cup are not smaller versions of an Olympic Games, and treating them that way is a mistake organisers sometimes make. A rugby tournament runs across multiple host cities and stadiums over several weeks, closer in structure to Paris 2024, while a Ryder Cup concentrates enormous demand into a single venue over a handful of days, with a merchandise operation that has to absorb queues the size of a small town in short, sharp bursts.
What stays constant across both is the model rather than the scale. One dataset across every format, sites scoped individually rather than templated, resilience built in for the moments when a queue cannot be allowed to stall, and a workforce that is trained fast and supported live on the day. BC4 has applied that same approach across its work with the Rugby World Cup and the Ryder Cup, adjusting the shape of the deployment, whether that means more sites over a longer window or a single venue under extreme peak pressure, without changing the underlying principles.
For organisers planning their own event retail operation, a few lessons come up consistently.
BC4 offers a free event readiness review that maps your sites, your formats and your peak demand against the model above, and gives you a clear picture of what needs to be in place before doors open . Get in touch to arrange a call.
For an event on the scale of an Olympic Games or a World Cup, site mapping and platform decisions typically need to start well over a year out, with hardware procurement, integration testing and staff training plans following once the site list is confirmed. Smaller single-venue events can work to a shorter timeline, but the same sequence of decisions still has to happen in order.
A well-built event retail platform is designed to keep trading offline and sync automatically once connectivity returns. Sites that depend entirely on a live connection are the ones most likely to experience downtime at exactly the moment demand peaks.
Yes, and this is one of the biggest differences between an event retail operation that scales well and one that does not. Running every format on one Business Central and LS Central dataset means stock, pricing and sales are consistent everywhere, rather than needing to be reconciled manually after the event.
The system itself has to carry a lot of the weight. A simple, consistent till interface across every site format means new staff can be productive within hours, backed by short, focused training sessions rather than lengthy onboarding programmes.
HyperCare is BC4's model for on-site and remote support during live events, combining real-time monitoring, rapid incident response and a team embedded alongside venue and retail staff for the full duration of the event, rather than a helpdesk contacted only when something has already gone wrong.