E-Commerce Chat Library and Admin Tools

An e-commerce platform for independent food distributors was weighing build vs buy on two long-requested back-office features, and needed a partner that could execute either path without disrupting a product already in daily use by customers. Creating accounts for a customer's employees, setting permissions, and linking them to the right entities was still a manual process on the team's side, which meant staff time spent on account setup instead of anything that grew the business.

The second gap was chat. The platform's mobile app already had messaging, but it was built on a React Native library that could not be reused in the back office, so support and account teams had no equivalent way to message customers from the web product. Both features had to slot into an existing design system and an established codebase rather than introduce a parallel stack, which is what tipped the decision toward building rather than buying an off-the-shelf widget.

Leanware supplied one engineer, embedded directly with the in-house team rather than delivered as a separate project team. That single point of contact carried both features from scope to ship.

The employee management work added a new page to the back office so customers can create employee accounts, set permissions, and link them to entities themselves, closing out the manual process that used to run through support. The chat work was the heavier lift: a custom chat and messaging React library built from scratch, matched to the client's design system and wired into their existing stack of Next.js, React, React Native, Testing Library, Apollo, GraphQL, and Hasura.

The engagement ran on scrum, week-long sprints, with check-ins three times a week to keep the embedded engineer aligned with the in-house team's priorities. Product specs arrived incomplete more often than not, so a working pattern for an embedded engineer here was asking the right clarifying questions early rather than blocking on documentation that did not exist yet. The same held for the codebase itself: conventions and patterns were largely undocumented, and the engineer picked them up by reading the code rather than requiring a walkthrough.

Both projects shipped within the expected timelines, alongside a series of smaller fixes and enhancements across the applications. A Clutch review from the client credits how quickly the engineer onboarded to undocumented code, the steady on-time sprint delivery even through mid-sprint pivots, and a collaboration that felt like one team rather than a third-party vendor.

Per the confidentiality terms of the engagement, the client is identified only as an e-commerce company, and the engagement value stays confidential.