E-commerce and orders
Between “paid” and “delivered”,there are nine jobs.
A shop platform handles the basket and the checkout beautifully, and then stops. Everything after the payment — the invoice, the stock, the warehouse, the courier, the customer who wants to know where their parcel is — is somebody's morning, every morning.
The bakery with a webshop
Take a small bakery that started selling celebration cakes online during a quiet winter and now takes forty orders a week. The shop takes the money. After that, someone opens the invoicing system and types the customer's details in again, marks the stock of a decorating kit down by one, writes a personal note about collection, and later that week remembers to ask whether the cake was any good.
None of that is difficult. All of it is a Tuesday morning. And the note about collection is the only part that needs a human sentence — the rest is the same nine steps in the same order, forty times a week.
- ⚡TriggerWebhook
order.paid, 289,00 zł, collection on Saturday. - 2Address checkedPostal code matched against reference data. Free, no key.
- 3Invoice raisedFields from the order. Nobody typed a name or an address.
- 4Stock adjustedDecorating kit down one. Idempotency key is the order id.
- 5Collection noteAI step. Two warm sentences in the customer's language, in the bakery's tone.
- ✉SentE-mail with the invoice attached and a short link to the collection details.
- ⏸WaitUntil Saturday 18:00, then ask how it was.
Elapsed: 4.1 sSteps that called a model: 1
The usual seven
What people build first.
Order to invoice
Paid order in, invoice out, with the address validated on the way through so it is not rejected later by somebody whose job is rejecting invoices. KSeF-ready where the invoicing system supports it.
Shipping notice
When the carrier's webhook says it has shipped, the customer gets a message with a short link that counts its own redirects — so you know whether people click, without a tracker in anybody's browser.
Abandoned basket
Idle for forty minutes, wait two hours, send one message, split the subject line two ways, and stop the moment the order is placed. The goal ends the run; nobody gets reminded to buy what they have bought.
Stock warnings
A nightly pass over stock levels, weighted by how fast each line actually moves, producing one message with a list rather than forty alerts nobody reads.
Returns
A return request classified from the customer's own words — damaged, wrong size, changed their mind — and routed accordingly, with the label generated for the two of those three that do not need a person.
Review requests
Sent a set number of days after delivery rather than after dispatch, in the customer's language, and never to somebody whose order had a problem. That last condition is one branch and it saves a great deal of embarrassment.
The order was the easy part.
The first of the month.
The reconciliation is the job people describe last and value most. The shop says one thing, the payment provider says another, the accounting system says a third, and the differences are almost always explicable — a refund posted late, a payout that crossed a month boundary, a currency conversion done at a slightly different rate.
Almost always. The purpose of the workflow is not to do the sums, which are trivial, but to do them every day so that the first of the month contains four items to look at rather than four hundred.
Selling abroad.
Reference data does quiet work here. A country code that is real. A currency that exists. A postal code that belongs to the city named beside it. An address normalised into the shape the carrier for that country expects rather than the shape your form collected.
The message the customer receives can be written in their own language by an AI step, and a translation that is a step in a workflow is a translation that happens at three in the morning for the customer who ordered at three in the morning.
- ⚡ScheduleEurope/Warsaw. Yesterday's window.
- 2Three sourcesShop orders, payment provider settlements, accounting entries.
- 3Matched412 of 416 matched exactly. Deterministic; costs nothing.
- 4Four leftAI step reads the four and proposes a reason for each. A person confirms.
- ✉SentOne e-mail. Four lines. Not four hundred.
Every day, so the month-end is dullPaid steps: 1
What it replaces,
and what it does not.
It replaces the retyping, the reminders, the “did anyone send that?”, and the four hours at the start of each month. It does not replace the decision about which supplier to use, the conversation with the customer whose cake was wrong, or the judgment about whether a return is genuine.
It also does not replace your shop platform, your accounting software or your warehouse system. It is the thing between them, which is the part nobody sells because it is different in every business.
Worth saying plainly: a shop doing four orders a week does not need this. A shop doing forty is where it starts paying for itself, and a shop doing four hundred has usually already built some of it badly in a scripting language nobody wants to maintain.