March 20, 2026 10 min read Case Study

OrdersPilot.

A purpose-built operations panel for Indian D2C Shopify brands, solving the chaos of Cash-on-Delivery at scale.

Executive Summary

OrdersPilot transforms fragmented Shopify workflows into a centralized, high-velocity engine. By automating COD confirmations, integrating direct logistics, and implementing a prioritized CRM, it eliminates the operational overhead of manually managed spreadsheets and WhatsApp messages.

Logistics Integrations

Delhivery + Shiprocket

CRM Redesigns

Driven by agent feedback

Race Conditions

Post-queue implementation

The Problem

Cash-on-delivery (COD) dominates Indian e-commerce, but Shopify's admin lacks native workflows for unconfirmed orders. Past a few hundred orders per day, manual management via exported CSVs and manual calls inevitably breaks down.

"The logistics team was spending 4 hours a day just cleaning up spreadsheets from the calling team."

Before OrdersPilot

01Unconfirmed orders flooding the Shopify dispatch queue
02Calling teams working from disjointed spreadsheets
03Dispatch split across multiple courier tabs
04No single source of truth for daily shipping
05Extreme RTO rates and wasted inventory costs

PAIN

What I Built

A multi-tenant B2B SaaS panel that plugs directly into Shopify store webhooks, providing the operations team with a high-fidelity workspace.

COD Order Management

Intelligent prioritization of calling queues with confirm/cancel dispatch pipeline.

Logistics Integration

Native Delhivery + Shiprocket API connection for one-click shipment generation.

WhatsApp Automation

Automated confirmation triggers via WhatsApp Business API on order state change.

Dynamic PDF Engine

Custom courier-formatted labels using pdf-lib and proprietary font embedding.

Technology Stack

Layer	Tech
Frontend	React (MERN)
Backend	Node.js + Express
Database	MongoDB
Integration	Shopify REST API
Logistics	Delhivery + Shiprocket
Messaging	WhatsApp API
PDF Gen	pdf-lib + fontkit

Process Flow

Engineering Challenges

Issue 01

Webhook Race Conditions

Shopify fires events (created, updated, cancelled) in rapid bursts. In busy stores, these often arrive out of order, causing state mismatches where a "cancelled" order might be processed before its "created" event.

Fix: Queue Serialization

Implemented a queue-based processing layer that serializes webhook events per order ID, ensuring chronological processing regardless of arrival time.

Issue 02

PDF Label Consistency

Custom font rendering differed subtly across batches of hundreds of shipping labels. This was traced to inconsistent subsetting behavior in pdf-lib when handling external font files.

Fix: Full Font Embedding

Forced full font embedding across the generation pipeline. While it increased file sizes by 12KB per label, it guaranteed pixel-perfect consistency across all manifests.

Hard Lesson #01

"Simple CRUD apps" require deep product thinking—the calling team CRM went through 3 redesigns before matching real agent workflows. Watching a real agent use it for ten minutes taught me more than a week of assumptions.

Hard Lesson #02

Any system that relies on external event streams needs to be built from the start with the assumption that events will be duplicated, delayed, or arrive out of order.

Status & Roadmap

Active Development

Currently scaling to support higher order volumes and optimizing the PDF generation engine for sub-50ms latency.

Planned Features

Returns management module
Advanced analytics dashboards for ops managers
AI-driven RTO prediction engine