I don't theorise about this. Here are two real things.

Why I can't name it: the buyer doesn't want competitors seeing how it works, and that's a reasonable ask for something this specific to their operation. So no brand name, no link, no screenshots. What I can do is describe what's actually running under the hood - which is a better test of whether this is real than a logo would be anyway.

Why I built it this way: this wasn't guesswork. I know the wholesale and CRM landscape well enough to know where off-the-shelf systems break down for a real supplier-retailer relationship, and where most bespoke builds waste time over-engineering the wrong parts - and a sales background meant I knew what actually makes a sales agent's day easier, because I've done that job, not read about it. That combination is what turned a one-line brief into a working, sellable product in weeks rather than years, with no requirements ping-pong and no project manager translating between client and developer.

The real problem: suppliers and retailers in this world are notoriously tech-averse - ask them to upload a spreadsheet and they'll go straight back to phone, pen, and paper. So the design had to make things easier, not add features. There was a deadline behind it too: they needed this live to launch their company, not on a normal agency timeline. A year-plus build was never on the table.

Accounts created automatically. Auto-login links sent out - no password to forget. The retailer view kept dead simple, the supplier view even simpler. All the complexity lives in the admin view, out of the way of the people who just need to place an order.

What's actually running under that simple surface: a retailer places one order, and it's automatically split into separate purchase orders per supplier behind the scenes - the retailer never sees who the suppliers are, and never needs to. Sale-or-Return terms and credit limits are enforced per retailer, with a 1-in-1-out control on stock so credit doesn't quietly run away. Every order's status - what the retailer sees and what the admin side sees - comes from the same source, so the two views can't drift apart.

Sales agents are paid through a proper commission engine, not a spreadsheet: hourly pay and commission run as independent settings per agent, payouts trigger at different stages of a deal, rates can taper by tier, commission windows are configurable, and a monthly pay run moves everything through Pending → Approved → Paid with clawback built in if a deal falls through. That's a system most companies buy separately from a specialist payroll vendor.

Product images come in through their own pipeline - an AI service strips backgrounds and standardises every image automatically, running as a monitored background job that checks in every few hours and texts me if it goes down. Courier tracking plugs straight in. Gap analysis catches missing orders before they turn into a phone call. Full ledger and communications trail - SMS, voice, and email through one inbox - so nothing falls through the cracks.

Kept deliberately outcome-level - no product name, no code, no architecture - by agreement with the buyer. What's shareable is how a one-line brief turned into a finished, sellable product.

Phase 1 - scoping it from experience, not from a spec

Phase 2 - building it and presenting it

A few of the things that came out of it, kept deliberately vague: the entire order lifecycle - supplier confirmation through to retailer invoicing and any refund - runs as a single automatic cascade, so nothing needs manually pushing from one stage to the next. Every order status shown to a retailer and to the admin side comes from exactly the same source, so the two views can never quietly disagree about where an order actually stands. And commission owed to sales agents is tracked as a running ledger, updated automatically, rather than reconciled by hand at the end of the month.

Real documentation throughout, complexity pushed into the admin layer so everyone else gets simplicity, and a design I stood behind well enough to sell as a finished product rather than bill as a job.

Started as buying old iMacs and MacBooks, refurbishing them, and reselling - moderate success, not a fortune. Pivoted to a repair-and-OS-update service when that made more sense than chasing resale margins.

What I've tested - results differ: leaflets, Google ads, and Facebook ads were all tried and all failed to convert. Magazine ads are more mixed - I still advertise there, just for a smaller return than a few years ago. They're still one of the few ways to land a message directly in local homes, and worth it for brand awareness, but the cost doesn't always match the return the way it used to. SEO is largely dead now too, since local traffic has shifted to Facebook and YouTube reels. Not every channel is a flat failure - some just don't pay what they used to.

What's working, still early: organic short-form video. Underway, unproven at scale, but the first channel that's shown real signs of life after everything else failed.

Why this matters to you: this is deliberately my third priority, not my first - Home Counties AI is where my time goes. Which is itself the honest part: it runs on real, tested channels rather than constant attention, and what's above is the actual state of it, not a highlight reel kept polished for this page. If you run a local business, this is probably closer to your own experience than anything a polished agency will show you.