"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. 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 — owners already refer other owners in the same supplier and community circles.
One platform, each layer building on the one before it — every layer 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 started with local delivery in Calgary and has grown into a full operating system for small and medium business — retail, restaurants, suppliers, and the drivers connecting them, each one running their own store while sharing the same technology, delivery network, and supplier connections as every other store on the platform.
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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.
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.
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.
BuyNearby didn't start as a software platform — it started as a delivery service, and grew into one as the need became clear.
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.
Amazon built infrastructure for centralized commerce. DoorDash built infrastructure for local delivery. Square built infrastructure for payments and POS. BuyNearby is building infrastructure for independent local commerce — not another marketplace sitting on top of someone else's stack.
Point-of-sale companies sell software to a single store. Delivery apps route orders through someone else's drivers. Wholesale marketplaces connect suppliers to retailers and stop there. Large platforms are starting to open their stores to AI agents, one store at a time.
BuyNearby's position is narrower and more specific: we build all of it — POS, owned delivery dispatch, wholesale supply, shared loyalty, and AI-agent-ready ordering — as one connected system, purpose-built for independent local businesses rather than adapted down from enterprise retail software. That combination, aimed specifically at small and local operators, is what we're building our category around.