What Importifier actually does.

The single biggest gap in the existing distributor software landscape (specifically: ChannelSnap, the incumbent for Ontario boutique importers) is the inability to actually take payment. They generate an invoice; you forward it to your customer; the customer pays by e-transfer or cheque or forgets entirely. You spend the back end of every month reconciling.

Importifier ships card payments out of the box. Your customer hits your storefront, builds a cart from your public-visible SKUs, picks "Pay by card" or "Send me an invoice," and either pays Converge directly (funds settle to your bank) or generates a draft invoice for your review. If they want an invoice, you see it on your dashboard tagged "needs review" — apply the right pricing tier, send it out, done.

Tier pricing is automatic. A licensee gets their wholesale price; a private client gets retail. The difference shows up at the line-item level, on the invoice PDF, and in your reports. The "Apply [tier] pricing" button on draft orders lets you re-price an order at the customer's tier in one click if they switch.

Boutique agents on the LCBO's elite (Specialty Services) system live in three xlsx files: a master portfolio they maintain, three daily reports the LCBO emails them, and per-PO emails from [email protected] that need to land in inventory. ChannelSnap helps with the portfolio submission but requires manual upload of the daily reports. Everything else is by hand.

Importifier's portfolio submission generates the canonical xlsx the LCBO expects — SCC code, vintage, pack, container size, supplier, port, the whole hierarchy — from your catalog. No more side-by-side spreadsheet wrangling to reformat what you already have in your own system.

Daily report ingestion runs on a schedule. Stock on Hand Master updates SKU-level inventory. POs in Transit and POs in 'A' Status update purchase order state. You stop opening the daily LCBO email and start trusting your dashboard reflects the real LCBO position.

Two paths, depending on whether you have an existing website you love:

Use our hosted templates. Pick from four presets — classic, editorial, minimal, cellar — each tuned for the wine-magazine aesthetic rather than the generic e-commerce template look. Set a hero image, brand color, tagline, and featured products, and you're shippable. Brand-new tenants are typically live in under an hour.

Keep your existing site. If you've already invested in a Squarespace / Wix / custom site you don't want to abandon, embed our shopping cart as a JavaScript component on your existing pages. Your pretty design stays; customers get a real ordering flow. (This path is on the immediate roadmap — first beta customer is on hosted templates.)

Custom domain support is built in. Bring your own myimports.com, point DNS at us, and we provision a free Let's Encrypt certificate automatically. We don't add a parked .importifier.com subdomain — the domain that serves your storefront is your domain.

Every distributor needs the same primitives: producers, products, suppliers, inventory, customers, orders, invoices, and the audit trail your accountant assumes exists. Importifier has each one as a first-class entity, not a row in a spreadsheet you maintain on the side.

Wine and spirits live in the same schema with discriminator fields, so a wine-only tenant doesn't see spirits-specific forms and vice versa. Single codebase, but the operator experience is tuned per category.

Customer tiers are explicit. Every customer is tagged with a tier (wholesale / private / restaurant / etc.); pricing applies automatically based on the tier. Orders carry their pricing tier as a snapshot, so historical orders reflect the price the customer actually paid even if the tier definition changes later.

Audit logging is coarse but coherent. Every meaningful write — order created, invoice sent, inventory adjusted, customer pricing tier changed — generates an audit row with actor, action, target, and a structured payload. The audit log is searchable by tenant operator and exportable in full.

The market for distributor SaaS is dominated by US-hosted products with vague data terms. We took a different position: hosted in Canada, multi-cloud, isolated at the database layer, and exportable any time without asking permission.

Primary infrastructure runs on DigitalOcean Toronto. Backups go to Google Cloud Storage in Toronto, encrypted with a Cloud KMS key wrapped by an offline age envelope key we control. The trust boundary between primary and backup is deliberate — a compromised cloud provider can't see your backup keys.

Tenant isolation isn't just an application-layer WHERE tenant_id = ?. We use Postgres row-level security (RLS), which Postgres enforces regardless of what our application code does. A bug in our code can't leak another tenant's data, period — RLS catches it at the database layer.

Disaster recovery is tested quarterly by restoring the latest backup into a standing GCP project (Cloud Run + Cloud SQL) and running smoke tests against it. Restored tenant data, restored pricing, restored audit logs.

Importifier is in private beta and we're building toward feature parity (and beyond) with the incumbent distributor tools. Beta customers get the full roadmap with delivery estimates. Short version of what's in flight: