Listen. People think the agency is the clever one. The hardware store taught me more about AI than the agency did, because a hardware store has no patience for clever. A customer wants a price, a delivery date and a bank reference. That is it.
I run an online hardware store. Real suppliers, real quotes, real orders, real customers who WhatsApp on a Saturday morning. Here is how it runs.
## The store has its own brain, separate from the agency
The store runs on its own CRM that I built on Cloudflare the same way the agency’s Hub was built: by telling Claude Code what I wanted and correcting it until it worked. It holds contacts, chats, orders, quotes, requests for quotes, suppliers, message templates and the automations. Its own database. It never touches the agency’s systems.
Two businesses, two brains. Run two businesses off one CRM and one day you will email a hardware customer about social media.
## Everything comes in through WhatsApp
Customers WhatsApp. Suppliers WhatsApp. My own number is linked to a server that never switches off, and every message in or out is copied into a database. The store has its own queue on that bridge. So “did we ever reply to that guy about the drill” is a search, not a scroll.
## Job 1: supplier pamphlet to listed products
Suppliers send pamphlets. PDFs, photos of pages, sometimes a photo of a photo. Listing those by hand is a week of typing and a lot of wrong decimal points.
So I trained an extractor. You give it the pamphlet. It reads every product, pulls the name, the code, the pack size and the price, and gives me a list ready to load.
The first run was bad. The tenth run was good. Not because the model improved. Because I corrected it ten times. “That is a pack of 50, not 50 units.” “Ignore the header row.” “This supplier puts the code at the end.” Every correction stays. That is training. Same as a new staff member, except it does not forget on Monday.
## Job 2: the price check that caught an item below cost
This one paid for the whole exercise. A price check runs over the listed products against what they cost me. One day it flagged an item I was selling for less than I was paying for it. A supplier price had gone up and my listing had not. I would not have noticed until I counted the month.
A rule, a timer, a flag. No intelligence needed. That is automation. Deciding what to do about it, that is me.
## Job 3: the timetable, Monday to Saturday
About fifteen timed jobs run during business hours, Monday to Saturday:
– quote sync, so a quote drafted in WhatsApp is in the CRM;
– the order watcher, which sees a new order and starts the chain;
– the RFQ chaser, which chases a supplier for a price I asked for and never got;
– quote follow-up, which chases a customer who got a quote and went quiet;
– reprice on reply, so when a supplier finally answers, the quote updates;
– EFT follow-up, because the store takes EFT, and “paying now” sometimes means Thursday;
– spam rescue, so a real customer who landed in the wrong place gets pulled back;
– proof-of-delivery review, WhatsApp triage and CRM sync.
Supplier price sync is on hold. Being honest: not everything is switched on. The things that are on, run.
## What AI actually does in the store
Three things. It reads: pamphlets, messages, proof-of-delivery photos. It drafts: the quote message, the follow-up, the “your order is on its way”. It classifies: is this message an order, a question, a supplier or spam.
That is the whole list. The store will draft a quote. It will not decide my price. Every rule it follows is a rule I wrote after doing the job by hand, and that is the only way I trust it.
## What it changed
I do not sit in the WhatsApp all day. I open the CRM in the morning, see what was chased, what came in, what was flagged, and I decide. A store that runs on a timetable, three AI jobs and one human with judgment. That is the whole model. It is the same model as the agency, and it is the same model I would build with you.
## Do this first
Take your supplier price list. Any one. Give it to an AI and ask for a clean product table. Check it. Correct it. Give it the next one. By the fifth one you have a tool. That is how it started here.
Send us the process that is wasting your team’s time. WhatsApp: https://wa.me/27797327231
Want to build the prompt for that first pamphlet yourself? prompts.socialzip.co.za