Order and route manager for firewood sellers

The idea

Firewood is a genuine seasonal business, $200 to $450 a cord, and from September to February the phone doesn’t stop. Orders live on a notepad on the dash: who wanted a half cord stacked, who’s in the far zone that costs extra to reach, who’s paying cash. Wrong loads get delivered and whole afternoons go to callbacks.

No vertical tool exists, and generic e-commerce genuinely can’t express the core order: half cord, stacked, zone 3, cash on delivery. Zone-based delivery fees plus a cash-or-card toggle plus a run sheet for the truck is a small, specific product that maps one-to-one onto how these businesses already operate.

Who pays

The buyer is the owner-operator firewood seller, often a tree service or farm sideline, who pays $29/mo from September through February and pauses in summer, so price it to make pausing painless. Distribution: rural Facebook marketplace sellers (easy to find, they post constantly), arborist and tree-work forums, and firewood processor equipment groups.

MVP scope

• Public order page with cord products, add-ons, and zone-resolved delivery fees
• Stripe Checkout plus a cash-on-delivery toggle per seller
• Order queue with assignment to delivery days
• Printable daily run sheet grouped by zone with payment status
• Manual-quote fallback for addresses that don’t match a zone
• Skip for v1: live route optimisation, driver mobile app, inventory or moisture tracking, SMS notifications, multi-truck dispatch

Build CordLoad, an order and delivery manager for firewood sellers. Stack: Next.js App Router, Supabase (Postgres, magic-link auth), Stripe Checkout for online payment.

Core flow: the seller sets up products (full cord, half cord, quarter cord, bundles) with base prices, add-ons (stacking fee, kindling), and delivery zones defined as lists of postcodes or towns, each with its own delivery fee. They share one public order page: the customer picks quantity and add-ons, enters their address, and the page resolves the zone and shows the full price. Payment is either Stripe Checkout or a cash-on-delivery option the seller can toggle. Orders land in a queue; the seller assigns each to a delivery day, and the day view produces a printable run sheet grouped by zone with address, product, add-ons, amount due, and paid or COD status.

Pages: public order page, order queue, delivery day view with drag-to-reorder stops, products and zones settings, season summary (revenue by product and zone), billing.

Implementation details: unmatched addresses fall through to a manual-quote state instead of erroring, since rural addresses are messy; the run sheet needs a print stylesheet because it lives on a clipboard in the truck.

Pricing: $29/mo via Stripe, with a pause option for the off-season baked into the pricing page.