"Give me 1.37 kg of this fish" isn't a checkout flow Shopify or Square was built around. Butchers, fish markets, produce, and bulk goods run on weight and price-per-unit, not fixed SKUs — a structural gap generic e-commerce tooling has never closed, and the reason these stores have been locked out of online commerce. That gap is most concentrated in independent and diaspora grocery today: Desi, Middle Eastern, African, and specialty stores, where variable-weight product and community trust already overlap. It's who we serve now, and how we grow: trust travels fast in these communities, and owners already refer other owners through the same supplier and family circles. We don't buy growth; we earn it one referral at a time.
Independent retailers anchor their neighbourhoods — they employ locally, stock the foods their communities actually eat, and recirculate money close to home. Every neighbourhood that loses its independent stores loses jobs, culture, and a piece of its identity — and the platforms built for scale are not coming to save them. BuyNearby exists so the corner store can compete with the chain without giving up what makes it local. This is not a charity layer on top of a business model. It is the business model: we earn when independent stores sell, and when they run their shop on our system.
POS, online ordering, delivery, wholesale supply, and AI tools that used to require an enterprise budget — in one affordable system built for the owner-operated shop, not adapted down from big-box software.
Diaspora and specialty grocers — Desi, Middle Eastern, African — carry the foods and community trust that mainstream delivery apps rarely serve well. We start where local identity is strongest.
Neighbours get the convenience of same-day delivery and one shared loyalty balance, while their spend stays with the local owners and families who run the stores they already know.
A growing delivery network gives drivers in each city a flexible way to earn, and every new store creates more local work — paid out through transparent, built-in payouts.
Suppliers, retailers, and drivers share one network, so small businesses gain collective buying power, shared loyalty, and visibility to AI shopping assistants that no single store could build alone.
We earn two ways: a revenue share on marketplace sales, and a subscription for the POS that runs the store. Both grow only when the store does — and we never take the customer relationship. The store keeps its brand, its customers, and its independence.
When independent stores thrive, neighbourhoods thrive — and so do we.
As the network grows we intend to measure and report impact openly — independent stores onboarded, local jobs supported, and spend kept in neighbourhood businesses.
It starts with the Retail OS that runs the store. Every layer after it plugs into the same system and brings something no store had on its own.
One world. A smart way to run your store for today's world — independent, but united.
BuyNearby began as one founder solving one store's delivery problem in Calgary. It has become an operating system for local commerce — retail, restaurants, suppliers, and the drivers connecting them. Every store runs independently, yet shares the technology, delivery network, and supplier relationships that once only chains could afford.
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A customer tells an AI agent: "I need 2 kg of fresh salmon, Kerala banana chips, 5 kg rice, and chicken curry." The agent checks participating stores, checks inventory, checks prices, creates the order, processes payment, and coordinates fulfillment. The customer never browses a marketplace — the AI does the shopping, and the local store becomes accessible to AI agents through BuyNearby.
Any AI agent can query real, always-accurate local product, price, and stock data directly — the same actions a human completes on the site, not a request queued for a human to review. As more stores join, the goal is to be the default local database AI agents reach for.
A typical independent store stitches together a POS, an online store, a delivery app, a loyalty tool, a scheduling and timesheet app, signage, inventory spreadsheets, and a wholesale ordering process — each with its own login, bill, and data silo that never talks to the others. BuyNearby replaces the pile with one system and one set of records, so a sale updates stock, loyalty, payouts, and reporting at the same moment.
Fewer tools means fewer bills, fewer logins, and no reconciling between systems — and every service we add makes the store harder to leave and more valuable to us.
We don't buy customers. We win one trusted community at a time, starting where independent stores are most underserved and most connected.
Desi, Middle Eastern, African, and specialty grocers have variable-weight products, loyal communities, and no good software built for them. Start in Calgary, where we already operate.
A direct field sales approach: we visit stores in area routes, set up the catalogue with the owner, and get the till running. Reps work through a dedicated sales portal.
Owners refer owners through shared suppliers and community circles. Suppliers we onboard bring their retailers, and every invited business becomes a real store on the platform.
Each store adds POS subscription revenue and marketplace volume. The same playbook then moves to the next city and the next community.
Everything below is running in production on buynearby.store, not on a roadmap slide. We built four sides of local commerce on one shared schema and one billing layer.
A working point-of-sale product (browser POS, dedicated Windows POS build, and a customer-facing display mode) tied directly into the same inventory and order records as the online storefront — no separate system to reconcile.
Drivers run a real progressive web app that reports live GPS location; customers track deliveries against that live position, not a canned map. Driver signup, document verification, and Stripe Connect payouts are all built and running — this is our own dispatch, not a third-party integration.
Stores keep selling on their existing Shopify storefront — BuyNearby syncs the product catalog and inventory automatically, and ships Calgary-area deliveries for orders placed there, with a live delivery quote shown at Shopify checkout via Shopify's own Carrier Service API. A store's own dashboard controls whether the customer or the store pays for that delivery, per sales channel.
Suppliers manage catalogs, invoice retailers, get paid via Stripe Connect, and share pricing directly with the stores they supply — a real B2B ordering flow, not a lead-gen form.
Restaurants and stores are gated into subscription tiers (POS access, delivery limits, analytics, admin seats) enforced directly in code, with schema that self-heals across deploys rather than relying on manual migrations.
A standards-compliant Model Context Protocol server, with OAuth 2.0 authorization, listed on the official MCP registry. AI assistants like Claude can search products, check live stock, place real orders, and book real courier deliveries directly — the same actions a human completes on the site, not a request queued for a human to review.
Natural-language search ("ingredients for a pasta dinner") backed by a real LLM call against live product and store data, with automatic fallback to keyword search if the AI call fails.
One point balance across every store on the network — a customer earns points shopping at one store and can redeem them at any other. The same trick the big-box chains use to keep customers inside their walls, now working for independent stores instead.
A working referral/affiliate system with real applications and a live partner portal, not just a signup page.
An internal LLM chat tool for the founding team that can query live order counts, revenue, and store activity in natural language — used to run the business day to day, not just demoed.
Every order scored automatically for anomalies — new-account high-value orders, order velocity, payment-pattern risk — surfaced for staff review within minutes, not caught after the fact.
Every customer scored for lifetime value and churn risk against their own ordering cadence, so the team can reach out before a good customer goes quiet.
14-day GMV and order-volume forecasts, plus margin-aware pricing recommendations benchmarked against comparable products across the marketplace — all advisory, reviewed by staff before anything changes.
Also running internally: automated weekly business reporting, store-expansion and supply-chain signals, cost-optimization analysis, and an audit trail of every AI-driven recommendation and whether a human reviewed it.
We didn't start with a pitch deck or a thesis. We started behind a store counter, with a real customer who needed a real delivery — and every layer since was built because a store owner asked for it.
Founder Rioj Jacob Thomas builds a delivery solution for his own retail store, taking and coordinating orders directly over WhatsApp. Conversations with other local retailers reveal they need the same solution — the idea starts growing beyond one store.
The full marketplace launches — buynearby.store goes live, moving store discovery and ordering off WhatsApp and onto a real platform.
Foundation month for the current platform build-out — core storefront, cart, and checkout flow established.
Driver network, POS, and supplier wholesale flow built out in parallel with the retail storefront.
Heaviest build month to date — 111 commits — spanning plan-based feature gating for restaurants and deeper POS/courier integration.
AI-powered product search shipped; affiliate program and internal AI operations assistant added.
Live Model Context Protocol server shipped with OAuth 2.0 authorization and listed on the official MCP registry — the platform itself became directly operable by AI agents.
The current platform's build-out (April–September 2026) alone represents 281 commits of continuous development, including a 111-commit month in July.
Who it's for: independent, owner-operated stores and restaurants — starting with diaspora and specialty grocers — that are too small for enterprise software and underserved by generic tools.
What it is: one operating system that replaces the ten subscriptions a store stitches together today: POS, inventory and expiry, loyalty, timesheets, digital signage, wholesale ordering, and AI assistance.
Why it wins: the software is the foundation, and the marketplace and owned delivery network are built in, so a store gets customers from the same system it runs on. POS companies stop at the till. Delivery apps rent out their own drivers and own the customer. Marketplaces send traffic to stores that run on someone else's software. We do the till, the shelf, and the customer together.
How we make money: recurring POS subscriptions and a revenue share on marketplace sales. Both grow only when independent stores do.