One system you own: the e-commerce orchestration platform we're building

You sell on Allegro. You sell on your own shop. Maybe eBay or Amazon is next. And somewhere along the way, the tools that were supposed to hold it all together became the problem. Either you pay a channel manager a fee on every single order — forever, and more as you grow — or you hold it together yourself with exports, spreadsheets, and a couple of scripts that break the week a marketplace changes its API. Your orders, your stock, your customers — the data that is your business — live on someone else’s servers, under someone else’s pricing. We’ve watched shop after shop hit that wall.

So here’s what we’re building instead: an open-source, self-hosted e-commerce orchestration platform you actually own — and here’s where we’re taking it.

The vision in one line

One system you own, with every sales channel connected through it.

That’s the whole picture. You run OpenLinker on your own infrastructure — your data, your order history, your pricing logic, all of it under your roof. Every marketplace you sell on flows in; your inventory sits at the center; shipping and invoicing flow out. One install, one place where your business actually runs. Not a black box bolted to the side of your shop — the e-commerce orchestration platform your shop is built around.

The connected loop

The point of orchestration is that the pieces aren’t separate tools you stitch together by hand. They’re one loop. An order lands from a marketplace, draws down stock that’s mirrored everywhere you sell, books a carrier, and produces an invoice — with every step reporting back into the same system. That’s the loop we’re building toward, and here’s how it comes together.

Your marketplaces, in one place

Allegro is where the path starts — a full offer suite, OAuth, a resumable event journal so nothing’s lost if anything pauses. From there the design is open: eBay, Shopify, Magento, Amazon and the rest connect as adapters that speak the same internal language. To the core, “a marketplace” is just a source of orders and a place to publish listings — so every channel you add lands in the same inbox, on the same screen, instead of another tab and another login. That’s what makes this a real marketplace integration platform, not a one-off Allegro connector.

Your inventory, as the single source of truth

Underneath every channel sits one stock figure. Inventory is the single source of truth, and the sync runs both ways: your shop’s catalog feeds the marketplaces, and a sale on any marketplace draws the stock down everywhere at once. No more overselling because two dashboards disagreed, no more spreadsheet reconciliation at the end of the day. The count is simply right across every channel you sell on — that’s the quiet payoff of self-hosted multichannel order management instead of a stack of disconnected dashboards.

Your carriers, in the same flow

An order isn’t done until it ships, so carriers live inside the loop. Shipping is its own capability — a port any carrier plugs into — so DHL, UPS, FedEx, DPD or whoever you hand parcels to connects the same way. The label, the tracking, and the marketplace shipping round-trip all report back into the same system that took the order. One place to see what’s shipped and what’s still waiting, whoever’s carrying it.

Your invoicing, closing the loop

The last step out is the invoice. Accounting is another capability port: QuickBooks, Xero, or whatever tool already runs your books connects the same way. The order that came in from a marketplace, drew down stock, and booked a carrier will close the loop by producing a compliant invoice through the system you already use — no double entry, no copy-paste between systems, no month-end surprise.

Put it together and the picture we’re building toward is one install on your own infrastructure: orders in from every marketplace, stock true everywhere, shipping booked, invoices issued — all of it inside a system you own.

The horizon: statistics and predictions

Here’s the part we’re most excited about, and it only becomes possible because of everything above.

When every order, every stock movement, every shipment and every invoice flows through one system you own, your data finally lives in one place — not scattered across a marketplace dashboard here, a courier portal there, an accounting tool somewhere else.

Plenty of tools will show you charts. What almost none of them give you is the underlying data to keep — to export, to feed your own models, to ask the questions nobody built a dashboard for. That’s the horizon we’re building toward: unified analytics across every channel, and demand forecasting on top of data you own. Which products move on which marketplace, in which season, at which margin after shipping — and what to stock before the spike, not after it.

You can rent a dashboard. You can’t rent the freedom to do whatever you want with your own numbers. That’s the difference owning the system makes — and it’s exactly why the architecture is shaped the way it is.

Why own it instead of renting it

There are really only three ways to run multichannel sales today.

You can rent a SaaS channel manager — BaseLinker, ChannelEngine, ChannelAdvisor. It works, but you pay a fee on every order — more as you grow — and your data lives on their servers, under their roadmap and their pricing. You’re renting the engine your business runs on.

You can build it yourself — scripts and integrations held together by hand. It’s yours, but it’s fragile, and it’s yours to fix at 2 a.m. when a marketplace changes its API.

Or you own the foundation. OpenLinker is the third option: self-hosted, Apache 2.0, running on your infrastructure with your data under your roof. No per-order meter. Built on a hexagonal core so it’s genuinely extensible — your pricing rules, your GPSR flows, your ERP hooks, the edges that make your shop yours — without waiting on a vendor’s backlog. You host it; that’s the trade. In return you stop paying a tax on your own growth, and the system that runs your business finally belongs to you.

What we’d like you to do

If you run a shop and you’re tired of paying a fee on every order — or tired of holding it all together with spreadsheets — take a look. This is the foundation we’re building for you, and we’d love your eyes on it early. (The integrations scorecard is public, if you want to track where the path runs.)

• Star the repo on GitHub — it’s the single biggest signal that this matters to people running real shops.
• Become a design partner — we’re working closely with the first shops shaping where this goes, and there’s room for more.

We’re building this in the open, on purpose. Come build it with us.