Live-selling commerce — Retail and marketplace operators

The problem

A retailer whose selling process does not match the platform they bought ends up working around their own system. The usual choice is to change how the business runs to suit the software, or to pay for a build from scratch, and neither is what the business actually wants.

What we built

nopCommerce deployments customised to how each client already sells, across food and beverage, alcohol retail, Chinese medicine, seafood, fruit, and a marketplace. The largest piece of custom work captures Facebook live selling: comments on a live stream are read as orders, the order is placed against the real catalogue, and a payment link goes back to the buyer.

The long version

Live selling is the interesting part. A seller goes live on Facebook, viewers comment to claim items, and somebody has to turn a fast-moving comment thread into orders before the stream ends. Done by hand it caps how much can be sold in a session and guarantees mistakes. Capturing the comments directly, placing each order against the real catalogue and sending the buyer a payment link removes both limits.

It was built once and deployed to five clients, which is the argument for customising a platform rather than starting from nothing: the second client paid a fraction of what the first did, and got something already proven in a live session.

The rest is the ordinary and necessary kind of work: making the platform fit how a fish seller, a fruit seller or a medicine retailer actually take and fulfil orders, rather than asking them to change to suit the software.