The operating system for commerce.
One codebase that runs wholesale, retail, dropshipping, marketplaces, third‑party fulfilment and your own storefronts — across many companies, warehouses, countries and currencies. Built by a team that runs it every day.
Why one system
Most trading businesses glue together an ERP, a warehouse system, a shop platform, a marketplace connector, a mailing tool and a CRM — and then spend their lives reconciling them. aiku is all of those at once, with one source of truth: a product is defined once and sold everywhere; stock moves once and every channel knows; a customer is one record whether they bought on your website, on a marketplace or through your sales team.
It is not a prototype. aiku is the production system behind a multi‑country wholesale and retail operation, and it is released as open source under the AGPL so that anyone can run it, read it, and improve it.
Wholesale first
Most of what aiku does is the unglamorous core of a trading business: trade customers with credit terms and price lists, B2B orders keyed by sales staff or placed on a trade portal, proformas, invoices and credit notes, purchase orders to suppliers, stock that is valued properly, and a warehouse that picks and packs what was sold — in several companies, currencies and countries at once.
Retail storefronts, marketplaces and dropshipping sit on top of that core and reuse it. They are real and they work; they are not the point.
What it does
- Multi‑entityOne group, many organisations, shops, warehouses and brands. Shared masters and stock; separate pricing, tax, invoicing and websites per market.
- Masters & catalogueDefine a product once at group level — trade units, barcodes, ingredients, GPSR data — and publish it to any number of shop catalogues with their own prices and RRPs.
- Ordering & billingB2B and B2C orders, baskets, pricing rules, offers, credit, VAT, invoices, credit notes, refunds, proformas.
- Warehouse & dispatchLocations, stock valuation, delivery notes, picking routes and sessions, packing, boxes, trolleys, printers, a handheld app, and carrier APIs for DPD, GLS, APC, CTT, Packeta and ITD.
- ProcurementSuppliers and agents, purchase orders, stock deliveries, supplier products, landed costs.
- 3PL fulfilmentPallet storage, deliveries and returns, stored items, recurring bills and invoicing for third‑party clients, with their own portal.
- Dropshipping & marketplacesTwo‑way sync of products, orders and shipments with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, TikTok Shop, Amazon, eBay, Allegro and Faire.
- WebsitesA built‑in CMS and storefront engine: web blocks, banners, menus, merchandised search, SEO, GDPR pages — server‑rendered and cached.
- Customer portalSelf‑service for B2B, dropshipping and fulfilment customers: orders, invoices, pallets, channel connections, saved cards, API keys.
- CRM, marketing & commsCustomers, prospects, reviews, polls, back‑in‑stock reminders, transactional and marketing email with delivery tracking, live chat, attribution by traffic source.
- AccountingPayments and gateways, payment accounts, top‑ups, invoice categories, financial reports.
- People & productionEmployees, clocking, timesheets, leave, roles. A manufacture module for artefacts, raw materials and job orders.
- Analytics, search & AITime‑series metrics, margins, exports; group‑wide search and semantic search; a permission‑scoped MCP server so assistants can answer questions about the business safely.
And, on the side: channels
The same catalogue can also be listed on marketplaces, or sold by your own customers on their shops (dropshipping), with those orders landing in the same warehouse queue. A small part of the system; a useful one.
Under the hood
PHP 8.4 · Laravel · Octane · Horizon · Passport · Pennant · Scout · laravel/mcp
PostgreSQL + pgvector · Redis · Typesense
Vue 3 · Inertia · Tailwind · Vite · TypeScript · React Native
Pest · Playwright
Around six thousand actions, one per thing the business can do; hydrators that keep every count and total honest at the point of change; time‑series tables for every dimension anyone has ever asked a question about.
On AI
We believe AI is a tool to empower human ingenuity, not to replace it. aiku ships a permission‑scoped MCP server so assistants can answer questions about the business; the decisions stay with people. How we drew that line →
Engineering notes
How parts of aiku came to be the way they are. All notes →
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The render that got slower every hour
For as long as the storefront has rendered on the server, a page missing from the cache cost about a second, and we kept blaming the size of the page. It was a translation helper. Every translated word left a small reactive effect behind in the rendering process, nothing ever cleaned it up, and every page drawn in a different language re-ran all of them. How a cost that grew with uptime gave it away, a heap diff full of translation keys, the twenty-line fix, and what changed once a cache miss cost 36 ms instead of 1.2 s.
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Ten days at sixteen per cent
We built reply suggestions for the customer service chat inbox, set a goal of 60% close to what staff really sent, and spent ten days between 10 and 20%. Better writers, a critic, 23,000 past replies as examples and a coverage gate did not move the live number. We stopped. For a drafter that gets one shot, the technology at a cost that makes sense is not there yet, so the next attempt puts each staff member's own AI assistant on the conversation instead.
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The customers in the spam folder
We read only the Gmail inbox, on purpose, and real customers were getting lost in Gmail spam. We now read the spam folder too. Rules clear most of it, a System One model sorts the rest for about four cents a month, anybody who has bought from us gets straight through, and nothing out of spam gets to open a file on its own.