What running a multi-channel store taught me about renting the software a business runs on, and why Openship and Openfront ship as source code.
Where it started
I started selling electronics in college. By senior year it was a real business: a warehouse, a couple of workers, orders coming in from Amazon and eBay, and fulfillment spread across several suppliers and warehouses.
I ran all of it through Zapier and Google Sheets. That held up at a few dozen orders a day. As volume grew, orders got duplicated, inventory counts drifted, and customers received the wrong items. I couldn't find software for small businesses that handled multi-channel fulfillment without wiring up every channel by hand, so in 2019 I learned to code and started building Openship.
Renting is not owning
Like many Amazon sellers, we moved to Shopify to own our store. Then Shopify removed its Amazon integration. The store was ours, but the platform's decisions were not.
That is the lesson I keep coming back to: if the software that runs your business belongs to someone else, they set the terms and can change them.
What source-owned means here
- Openship routes orders from the shops where you sell to the channels that fulfill them: suppliers, warehouses and 3PLs. It is open source, so the routing logic is code you can read and change.
- Openfront is a family of open-source commerce platforms, each with a customer storefront and an operator dashboard. E-commerce and Restaurant came first, and there are live demos for E-commerce, Restaurant and more. You get the complete source and deploy it where you choose.
- Marketplace queries independent Openfront stores for discovery, while each store keeps its own cart, checkout and payment processor. Payment goes straight to the store's own Stripe or PayPal account.
Owning the code doesn't mean doing everything yourself. It means the business can always take its storefront, its data and its operations somewhere else.
Try it
Start with the Openship source, or open one of the Openfront demos linked above.