Ask for an item, see the full price, send a ready request.
A prototype for a parcel forwarding company that buys from US stores for its customers. A customer writes what they want, the assistant finds it in US stores and shows the full price, and the owner sees what people look for and where they stop.
The pain
Customers message the company: can you buy this for me? Staff search the stores by hand, then work out the price with shipping and duty on a calculator. Answers take hours, and a customer who waits that long often buys somewhere else. Nobody sees which products people asked for and never bought.
Where it comes from
Almost every request follows the same steps: find the item, check the store, add forwarding and duty, confirm with the customer. Only the item changes. The prototype takes those steps into the chat and leaves the purchase itself to the team.
What we built
A customer writes in a chat what they want to buy. The assistant finds the item in real US stores and shows direct links to the store pages. It calculates the full price: the item, forwarding and an estimate of the import duty. The customer puts items in a cart, and the cart turns into a purchase request for the company. The server signs every price, so the total in a request cannot be edited. The owner gets a private panel: what people search for, why they buy, where they drop off, and the demand the company is missing, with a CSV export.
A customer asks the assistant
DEMOCustomer
Noise-cancelling headphones for flights. What would they cost me in total?
Assistant
Two models in US stores. Each price already includes forwarding and a duty estimate.
- Store AOpens the store pageIn cart
Over-ear headphones, noise cancelling
- Item
- $110
- Forwarding
- $20
- Duty estimate
- $10
Full price$140 - Store BOpens the store page
Compact earbuds, travel case
- Item
- $90
- Forwarding
- $20
- Duty estimate
- $10
Full price$120
Cart sent to the team as a purchase request
Owner panel
DEMOTop searches
times asked
- Noise-cancelling headphones40
- Rain jackets30
- Coffee grinders20
- Board games10
Missed demand
DEMOInvented data for a demonstration. Not a client, not a result.
Before and after
- Nobody owns it
- Runs by itself
- Assistant
- A person decides
- Where money leaks
What a pilot will measure
A pilot with a real company would measure two things over a stated period:
- The share of chats that end in a purchase request.
- How long a customer waits from the question to the full price.
Where a person stays
The team confirms every purchase request before anything is bought. The duty figure is an estimate, and a person settles the final amount with the customer. The owner reads the panel and decides which products and stores to put forward.