Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)

I have another ecommerce system that delivers boxes of organic produce all over the Seattle region.

So I am working on building an integration between the two systems. When a box of coffee is being shipped on the same day that the delivery company is already going to that region, redirect that box's fulfilment process away from USPS/FedEx and deliver it instead.

This saves 50% on shipping costs for the coffee company, and the delivery company gets paid for utilizing extra space in the delivery vans. It's been 4 months of work so far, and most of the individual pieces are working in production right now, hoping to enable all of it together this week or next. Just in time for the holidays ;)

The hardest part so far was integrating all the custom label generation, and mapping/routing so that it's seamless with the existing workflows of each company. The coffee company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for the new non-shipping orders, and the delivery company doesn't have a "separate" workflow for fulfilling orders they did not pack.

The real cherry on top is that it's built in such a way that N number of stores could integrate their stores into our fulfillment. This lets many local food producers who cant do their own fulfillment still participate in the local food economy without having "scale". It's kinda like an upside down Fulfillment By Amazon: they'll do your delivery for you as long as you sell through their store (and take their ever-increasing cut of the sale). This version lets the store owner maintain their own store, URL, branding, prices, availability, customer relationship, and margins, but then hook into our last-mile fulfillment.