For operations staff
Your job sits between the customer's payment and the picker's hands. You confirm purchases on retailer sites, handle batch failures, and keep the procurement queue moving. The dashboard surfaces what needs your attention; this guide walks you through each one.
Log in. Your dashboard lists every queue that needs human action, sorted by money at risk. From top to bottom:
Any order at or above £300 (you can change the threshold in Settings) is held for owner/staff approval before procurement. The customer has paid; we just haven't pressed "Buy" at the retailer yet.
Click ✓ Approve if everything looks legitimate (real customer, plausible address, reasonable product). The items immediately enter the normal procurement flow.
Click ✗ Reject if it looks like fraud (mismatched card/address, suspicious product mix, duplicate of a flagged account). You'll be asked for a reason. The order moves to cancelled. Refund must be done manually in Stripe/CMI for now — automated refunds aren't wired yet.
⚠ Watch out: Don't sit on high-value orders. Every hour you delay, the price/availability at the retailer can shift. If you're not sure, approve + flag for owner review (note field).
Items don't get bought one-by-one. They accumulate in a per-retailer open batch that closes either at 4 PM (auto) or when the £35 free-shipping threshold is reached.
On the dashboard, the "Open procurement batches" card shows each retailer's pending order: total £, progress bar to the free-shipping line, oldest item age. When ready:
💡 Tip: The auto-close cron runs at 16:00 every day. You only need to manually buy if you want to ship earlier OR if you're confident a customer wants their item TODAY (high-value, urgent).
Sometimes a batch fails AT the retailer's checkout: captcha shows up mid-flow, the Wise card gets declined, the retailer account gets temporarily flagged, etc. The auto-buyer can't recover — staff has to.
On the batch detail page, the "⚠ Cancel & recycle" button (top right) lets you:
No customer-facing email is sent — by the time the new batch processes (often within minutes), it'll look to them like a normal procurement.
⚠ Watch out: If the same batch fails twice in a row, escalate to the owner — likely a real account issue, not a transient retry.
You don't usually unpack parcels yourself — that's the picker. But you should keep an eye on the inbound queue for:
Customers reply to delivery emails, fill out the contact form, or sometimes call. The contact-form submissions land at the operator email (set in Settings) AND in Notifications so the inbox view shows everything.
For damaged / wrong / missing items: confirm with the picker by looking at their uploaded photos, then arrange the retailer return or refund the customer. There's no automated refund yet — process it in Stripe/CMI and log the result on the order.
| Signal on the dashboard | Action |
|---|---|
| Pending review · N orders | Review each, approve or reject within 1 hour. |
| Open batch ≥ £35 | Safe to click "Buy now" — free shipping is unlocked. |
| Stuck queue total > £100 | Drop everything — that's customer money sitting still. |
| Wise runway < 7 days | Tell the owner immediately — needs a top-up. |
| Auto-buyer success rate < 70% on a retailer | Open the procurement health card — find which adapter is breaking. |