Every local store owner we talked to while building BuyNearby described some version of the same trap: stay in-person-only and cap growth at foot traffic, or go online and hand a fifth to a third of every order to a delivery aggregator that owns the customer relationship instead of you.
Neither option is actually a choice. It's a tax on being small.
The generic tools don't fit
The obvious answer looks like "just use Shopify." But Shopify solves e-commerce, not hyperlocal same-day delivery — a store still needs to bolt on a delivery app, a POS system that talks to the online orders, and some way to handle the phone orders that never stop coming in even after a website exists. For a single-location grocery or restaurant owner who is also the one running the register, that's three or four logins and zero hours in the day to manage them.
What we set out to build instead
BuyNearby is built around one premise: a local store's storefront, point-of-sale, phone-order intake, inventory, and delivery logistics should be one system, not five. A customer orders from a store's page; the order shows up in the same dashboard the owner uses to ring up an in-person sale; a BuyNearby driver — not a rotating cast of gig workers spread across every app in the city — picks it up and delivers it same-day.
We started in Calgary because that's where we could walk into stores, watch how orders actually get handled, and fix what was broken instead of guessing. Desi Indian Market and a handful of other Calgary grocers and restaurants have been testing and pushing on the platform since early on — the perishability-aware inventory rules, the restaurant KDS, and the free-delivery-threshold logic all came out of things a real store owner asked for.
Where this goes next
Calgary is still our most active market, with early expansion into Edmonton underway. The near-term roadmap is about deepening what already works — restaurant Platform Connect syncing to DoorDash/Uber Eats/Skip for stores that want both worlds, supplier-to-retailer wholesale ordering, and a pay-at-pickup option for customers who want to skip paying online entirely.
We're a small, bootstrapped team building this from Calgary, for Calgary stores first. If you're a local store owner, a driver, or just someone who'd rather order from an actual neighborhood shop than a national chain's dark kitchen, we'd like to hear from you.
Store owners: see what BuyNearby OS looks like for your store. Everyone else: read more about what we're trying to build.