Production board for made-to-order sellers

The idea

A seller doing 300 made-to-order candles or engraved tumblers a month is running production out of two browser tabs, the Etsy orders page and Shopify admin, plus a paper list of what is curing on which shelf. Neither platform knows the order has four internal stages left and three days to go. The seller finds out an order is late when Etsy does, and late shipments directly damage Etsy search placement, which is the shop’s oxygen.

The wedge is that e-commerce dashboards report sales while nobody models the workshop’s WIP. Sync the orders, let the seller define their real stages, and compute one number per order: can the remaining work beat the ship-by date. That single red flag is the product.

Who pays

The shop owner pays 19 to 29 USD/month. Sellers at 100 to 500 orders/month have real revenue (often 5 to 20k USD/month) and a visceral fear of the late-shipment rate metric, so a tool that protects search rank prices easily. Distribution: Etsy seller communities are large and concentrated (r/EtsySellers, Facebook groups, YouTube seller channels), and Etsy’s own app marketplace listing brings organic installs.

MVP scope

• Etsy and Shopify OAuth connections with 10-minute order sync
• Configurable production stages and drag-and-drop kanban
• Ship-by risk computation with amber/red flags and red-first sorting
• Personalisation text surfaced prominently on every card
• Daily print view of today’s work grouped by stage
• Skip for v1: inventory/supplies tracking, team accounts, shipping label purchase, analytics, other marketplaces

Build MakerBoard, a web app that pulls made-to-order orders from Etsy and Shopify into a single production kanban. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres, Auth, RLS), Etsy Open API v3 with OAuth; Shopify via the Admin GraphQL API.

Core flow: seller connects a shop via OAuth, orders sync every 10 minutes (cron route hitting each connected shop, upserting by external order id). Seller defines their production stages once, e.g. cut, cure, personalise, pack (default template provided). Each order appears as a card showing item thumbnails, personalisation text pulled from the order (Etsy personalisation field, Shopify line-item properties), quantity, and ship-by date. Cards drag between stage columns; done moves them to a shipped archive when the platform marks them shipped.

Risk flags, the key feature: each stage has a seller-configured duration in days. For every order, compute remaining stage days versus days until ship-by date. Amber when slack is under 1 day, red when the remaining stages cannot beat the ship-by date. Red cards float to the top of every column.

Personalisation text is rendered large and copyable on the card, since typos on engraved goods are the most expensive mistake in the shop.

Pages: board, order detail drawer, stage settings, shop connections, daily print view (today's work grouped by stage), billing.

Pricing: 19 USD/month for one shop, 29 USD/month for both platforms. 14-day trial.