Raw Living Spirulina (Software)

The farm harvests on a weekly cycle and ships on a cold chain. The store software has to hold that schedule together. We maintain the Shopify platform and the stack of systems around it.

The challenge

Most online stores can be a day late and nobody notices. This one cannot. A subscription that renews on the wrong week, a delivery frequency a customer cannot change without calling, a quality message that lands behind forty general inquiries: each of those ends the same way, with fresh food arriving outside the window it was grown for.

So the brief was never a feature list. It was to make a set of separate systems behave like one, on a schedule set by the harvest rather than by the software.

What the stack does

• Subscriptions. Weekly and multi-week delivery frequencies, pausing, skipped deliveries, and the longer cycles the renewal programs run on. The founder rate the company offers holds while a subscription stays active, so the subscription record is what carries the price. Not a coupon code somebody has to remember.
• Shipping. Transit times by zone, feeding into the weekly harvest and dispatch cycle, so what the store promises at checkout is what the farm can actually put on a truck.
• Customer support. A contact form split across sixteen departments and routed accordingly. Delivery and quality messages have a clock on them and do not queue behind the rest.
• Email marketing. Connected to the store, so order and subscription events trigger the messages instead of a calendar.
• Referrals. A program wired into the store rather than sitting next to it with its own separate idea of who the customer is.
• Accounting. Store data reconciled against the books, without anyone re-entering it twice.

How the pieces fit

Any one of those systems is straightforward on its own. The difficulty is that they all hold an opinion about the same customer, and the opinions drift.

The subscription system knows somebody is due a delivery on Thursday. Shipping knows how long Thursday takes to reach Louisiana. Email knows whether that person has been told. The support desk knows they wrote in on Tuesday asking to skip the week. When those four facts disagree, somebody gets fresh food they did not want, or does not get the food they did.

So the integration work is mostly about deciding which system owns which fact, and making sure the others read it rather than keeping a copy. The store owns the order. The subscription record owns the schedule and the rate. The farm’s harvest cycle owns the calendar. Everything else reads down from those three.

Maintenance is the work

A store like this is never finished. Failed payment retries, app updates, Shopify platform changes, a new jar format, a shift in the dispatch schedule: it all lands on the same stack, and most of it lands without warning. We keep it running and we make the changes, which is why maintenance and support is a standing part of the engagement instead of a block of hours somebody draws down.

What this one shows

It is a useful case to look at if your own setup is a store plus half a dozen apps that nearly talk to each other.

• We take on the whole stack, not one app in it. Fixing the subscription tool while the shipping rules contradict it solves nothing.
• The business sets the schedule. Here the harvest does. The software bends to that, not the other way around.
• Support routing is engineering. Sixteen departments with the urgent ones prioritized is a design decision with money attached to it.

The result

The farm harvests weekly, the store renews on schedule, and the systems around it pass each other the same facts. The scope, the technical decisions and how each piece was resolved are worth going through properly, so we walk through them on a call rather than writing them up here.

The store itself, and the search work for the US market, are covered in Raw Living Spirulina (Web).