I built ShipOps to run my own store. Then other stores asked for it.

I am a software engineer. Most of my working life has been spent remotely, building products for companies in the United States. E-commerce was not the plan. I got into it the way a lot of people in Pakistan do: a small online store, cash on delivery, a courier account, and a team that grew one person at a time. The store is Fairy Liora, and it still runs on ShipOps every day.

What surprised me was not selling. It was everything that happens after the parcel leaves. A COD order is not a sale until the courier has delivered it, collected the cash, and paid that cash to you. Every step in between is somebody's job, and most of those jobs are done by hand.

This is what running the store looked like before ShipOps:

• An app to confirm COD orders before they shipped.
• Another app to book parcels with the courier and print labels.
• A login for every courier portal, opened again and again through the day to see which parcels were stuck.
• WhatsApp on a phone, to chase the customers whose delivery had failed.
• And for settlements, nothing. A spreadsheet, a stack of payout receipts, and an evening a week matching them to orders.

Each tool did its one thing. None of them talked to each other, and none of them could answer the question I cared about most at the end of the week: of everything we delivered, what has the courier actually paid us, and what is still missing?

So I did what an engineer does and built the tool I wanted. One app inside the store's admin: orders confirmed, parcels booked, every courier tracked in one list, the failing deliveries brought to the top with the next step written out, and the courier's payout receipts matched parcel by parcel against our orders.

It was built for us and nobody else. No pricing page, no onboarding, no marketing. It only had to save my team time, and it did. The portals stopped being opened. The Monday spreadsheet went away. The team spent its day on the parcels that needed a person, and the rest took care of themselves.

Other store owners I knew saw it and wanted it. I set it up for a few of them, and they told me the same thing my team had: hours a week back, and money from the courier they had not known was owed. That is when it became clear this was not a tool for one store. Every COD business in Pakistan has the same day.

So ShipOps came out. It is on the Shopify App Store, it works with the couriers Pakistani stores actually use, and it is built in the open with the stores that run on it. Most of what is on the roadmap came from a merchant's message.

The moment I knew this mattered beyond my own store came from a store we work with. A busy store, shipping thousands of parcels. When ShipOps checked their courier's payouts against their orders, it found Rs 8.5 million they did not know about.

This is not about a careless team. A payout receipt only lists what the courier paid, so a parcel that never made it onto one is invisible unless you have your own list to check against. That is the gap ShipOps closes, and it is why payout reconciliation is on every plan, free included.

From store owners' reviews on the Shopify App Store.

I believe every business in Pakistan should have this technology, not only the ones that can afford a stack of subscriptions. A store doing its first fifty orders a month needs to know what its courier owes it as much as a store doing five thousand.

So almost every feature is on the free plan. Courier booking, tracking, the action inbox, WhatsApp follow-ups and payout reconciliation are all there from the first day. The paid plans only raise how many orders a month you run through ShipOps and how many couriers you connect. The one thing that costs anything is an automated call, text or AI check, because each one costs real money to make, and even then a new store gets its first calls free. Automatic WhatsApp on your own Business number comes with the paid plans, priced per order, never per message. The details are on the pricing page.

My goal is simple to say: the owner sells, and ShipOps runs everything after the order. The whole journey of a COD order, from the moment it lands to the moment its cash is in your bank, handled for you, with a person called in only when a person is needed.

Every step above is in ShipOps today. What we are building now is fewer clicks between them, until the steps run on their own and your team only sees the exceptions. ShipOps stays independent while it does: it is not a courier and not an aggregator, it reads your own courier account, and your cash goes from the courier to your bank as it always has.

If you run a COD store, I would like to hear what your day looks like. Message me on WhatsApp, I read every one. Ahmed Khan, founder of ShipOps