Ten years as the technology behind someone else’s business

Bargainhunt.pk is not my company. It is a Pakistani e-commerce brand my wife founded in 2016 on a Facebook page, with no store, no cart and no website. She built it, she runs it, and the buying, the merchandising, the vendor relationships and the customer experience are hers. Those are the reasons it works.

I have been its technology partner for ten years. That part I can speak to.

2016: no store, no cart, no data

Orders arrived as Facebook messages. I built an order form on Google Forms so that what came in landed somewhere structured instead of in a chat thread.

Then the courier problem

Every dispatch meant re-typing customer details into a courier portal by hand. I wrote a script that generated the labels straight from the order data. Nobody puts this in a case study because it is not glamorous. It is also the difference between a business that can grow and one that quietly caps itself at whatever one person can retype in an evening.

Then a real storefront, twice

WooCommerce first. Later a full migration to Shopify, when the catalogue and the traffic outgrew it, without losing order history or search rankings.

And the acquisition

I have run the ad account since. Across the last two years that account turned PKR 5.1 million of spend into PKR 26.2 million in attributed revenue: a blended 5.09x return across 12,388 purchases, at a cost per purchase of about PKR 415. The trailing twelve months ran at 5.97x, with the strongest full month at 7.47x.

Ten years, one business, every technical layer. I could not fire myself and I could not walk away. Most agency case studies cover eight months and end when the invoice does.