Our first client deployment: a small agency shipped it without writing an adapter

We say it often: agencies are how OpenLinker reaches merchants. Here is the first real example — published with both parties’ consent and, at their request, fully anonymously, with no names or logos. A small implementation agency put OpenLinker into a packaging manufacturer’s stack. It runs in production at the client today, and it shows exactly who we are building this platform for.

The client

A corrugated-cardboard packaging manufacturer — boxes, roughly 80% B2B / 20% B2C. A growing shop, over 100 SKUs, selling on two channels at once: Allegro and their own PrestaShop store.

This is the textbook moment where watching stock levels by hand stops working, and every marketplace order has to end up in one fulfillment queue somehow. The question was never whether to automate. It was on what.

Why not a per-order SaaS

OpenLinker was this client’s first tool of its kind — deployed at the launch of the shop, not after years of fighting something else. That makes the decision more interesting, not less: it wasn’t an escape from a specific invoice, it was a deliberate choice at the start.

Instead of a channel manager billed per order (the model you know from BaseLinker and its equivalents), the client chose self-hosted and open source. The reasoning was simple: syncing Allegro and PrestaShop shouldn’t create a variable cost that grows with sales. The better the shop does, the more a meter like that hurts. And order and customer data stays on the client’s own infrastructure rather than someone else’s cloud.

The agency, and what the deployment actually took

The protagonist here is a small implementation agency — a handful of people. Their role was the deployment itself, not an ongoing retainer: a one-off project, handed over to the client to run in-house.

The detail that matters most to us: the agency did not write a single custom adapter. Standard configuration of the stock adapters was enough to assemble a working system. One person did it, in a short time, and the whole thing runs self-hosted on the client’s own infrastructure.

That’s precisely the scenario we designed the platform around. The Allegro, PrestaShop, inFakt and DPD stock adapters compose into a working system without touching code — and if non-standard logic is ever needed, the plugin SDK is there. It wasn’t needed here.

For an agency tech lead, that’s the whole argument in one line: the billable work was configuration and handover, not rebuilding order ingestion, inventory reconciliation and identifier mapping for the hundredth time.

What runs today

On this stack OpenLinker does three things at once, all on the client’s own server:

• Allegro ↔ PrestaShop sync — Allegro orders land in the shop, and stock levels stay consistent across both channels.
• Invoicing through inFakt — documents raised against orders without manual re-keying.
• Shipping through DPD — labels and consignments from the same system.

All of it without a channel-manager subscription and without a per-order fee. The bill is a server, not a counter that ticks up with every sale.

Being straight about it

We are keeping this story fully anonymous — no names, no logos, no client-side figures, because that’s what we agreed. So measurable outcomes — volumes, savings, sync times — are deliberately not published here. OpenLinker is still in alpha, pre-1.0, and we describe it that way.

But the fact itself says something: stock adapters composed into a working, self-hosted integration system — no code written, no per-order fee, one person, short timeline. That’s the promise we’re trying to deliver on, shown on our first real deployment.

Where to go next

• See how the platform is built — why the stock adapters are enough, and how custom logic goes in as a plugin against a stable core.
• Check the integrations scorecard — Allegro, PrestaShop, inFakt, DPD and the rest: what’s live and what’s still planned.
• Read the agency page — if you implement shops and want integrations in your offering without building a channel manager from scratch.
• Compare the cost against BaseLinker — where “no per-order fee” actually comes from.
• Star the repo on GitHub — if you want to back an open platform.

We’ll write up the next deployments the same way: honestly, and concretely.