Retail systems built for the money, not the shop window
Checkout is the easy half. We build what happens after it: held funds, disputes with locked evidence, recurring billing, and every location on one record.
Retail businesses rarely lose money at the checkout. They lose it in the settlement that did not reconcile, the refund nobody could evidence, and the twelfth location quietly running its own process. Those are the systems we build.
What commerce engineering actually demands
4 things that decide this
- 01Money is held, not just taken. WorkmateAI holds funds against the job through Stripe Connect and releases them on completion.
- 02A dispute freezes the release and locks the evidence at submission, then escalates in stages with a chargeback pack generated from the record.
- 03Maidily runs booking, recurring jobs, routing, invoicing and payments for residential cleaning companies, connected to Stripe, Square and QuickBooks.
- 04WAIQ holds one process across every site, department and role, which is the problem a chain hits at its twelfth location.
Commerce and multi-site systems we have shipped
Maidily
Integrated operations platform for residential cleaning businesses.
Read the case study →
WorkMateAI
Dispute resolution, payments, and compliance for Australia's on-demand trades.
Read the case study →
WAIQ
Business operations and execution platform for multi-site organizations.
Read the case study →
Three builds, three commerce problems
Each one solved a different part of what happens after a customer commits to buy.
| Build | What it does | The retail problem it solves | Where it runs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maidily | Booking, recurring jobs, invoicing, payments. | Taking money for a service, on a schedule. | Residential cleaning, United States |
| WorkmateAI | Held payments, verification, staged disputes. | What happens when a purchase goes wrong. | Trades marketplace, Australia |
| WAIQ | One process across every site and role. | Running twelve branches the same way. | Multi-site operations, multi-region |
- CheckoutStripe, in several builds.
- SettlementHeld and released funds.
- FulfilmentScheduling and routing.
- DisputesStaged, with locked evidence.
- ReconcileThree systems made to agree.
- Multi-siteOne record, many locations.
Every one of these six is a place a commerce business loses money quietly.
A refund is a harder feature than a checkout
Taking money is close to solved. Stripe handles it and most teams get there. What breaks a commerce business is the path after something goes wrong, and almost nobody designs that first.
WorkmateAI is the build where we did design it first. Funds are held against the work and released on completion. A dispute freezes the release, locks the evidence, and escalates in stages instead of landing in a founder's inbox.
- Never store money in a float. Integer minor units, every time.
- Decide who holds the funds, and for how long, before anyone writes the checkout.
- Lock dispute evidence at submission. Evidence you can edit later is not evidence.
- Write the retry rule down. A payment webhook will arrive twice.
The retail builds worth commissioning
Your platform handles the catalogue and the cart. The projects that move the numbers are the ones it was never designed to do.
A pricing engine your merchandisers control without a developer. Reconciliation between three systems that disagree about the same order. An assistant over your product and support history that cites where each answer came from, the way we grounded Greenlight's research platform.
- 01Integrations and reconciliation across the systems that already hold your orders, stock and ledger.
- 02Pricing and promotion logic your commercial team can change safely.
- 03Internal tools for the operations nobody sells software for, because they are specific to how you trade.
- 04AI over your own catalogue and support history, grounded and cited.
- 05Scoping calls cost nothing. Where we go into an existing codebase, a paid two-week diagnostic applies.
The stack behind the commerce work
Payments
Platform
Controls
“They will treat your vision like their own and build it that way.”
Ron Klabunde · Founder, SmartREI ↗
What retail buyers ask us
01Why bring us in when Shopify already runs our store?
For the work your platform was never designed to do. Shopify runs a checkout well. It will not run your pricing rules, reconcile three systems that disagree, or answer questions from your own support history. Those are the builds we ship.
02What does a retail engagement usually start with?
The place money goes missing. Failed settlement, refunds nobody can evidence, and stock figures that differ by system are the three we see most. Each needs a different build, so the first job is finding which one you actually have.
03Can you connect our store to the systems behind it?
Yes, and that is most of what a retail project with us looks like. Maidily connects to Stripe, Square, QuickBooks, Twilio and Mailchimp. Integration work is judged on what happens when one side is down, so retries and idempotency get designed rather than assumed.
04How would you handle refunds and chargebacks?
By designing the unhappy path before the happy one. WorkmateAI holds funds against the job, freezes release when a dispute opens, locks the evidence at submission, and generates the chargeback pack. Bolting that on after launch means reconstructing history you did not record.
05Can AI recommend products from our catalogue?
It can, with the same discipline we used on Greenlight's research platform: ground every answer in your own data and show the source. An assistant that invents a product specification will cost you more in returns than it earns in conversions.
