Case study An online store from a single sentence
ak7l: an online store built from one sentence
How we built a product where an Algerian merchant describes their store in one Arabic sentence, and it is built and published at its own address. Every change after that is another sentence.
01 The idea
A store that starts from a sentence
We wanted a merchant to open their store the way they would explain their business to anyone: one sentence in Arabic that says what they sell, where, and to whom. From that sentence the store is built and published at its own address, and every change after that is another sentence in the same conversation.
And ak7l is built on the way selling actually works in Algeria: cash on delivery, delivery priced by wilaya, and Arabic first with French a click away. An Algerian store from the ground up, not a foreign store in translation.
ak7l in numbers
- sentence is enough to build the store
- 1
- design directions for the merchant to choose from
- 3
- stages from the sentence to publishing
- 5
- languages for the merchant's dashboard: Arabic and French
- 2
02 The build
What we built
From the sentence to the order: an agent that builds the store, a server that publishes it, and a dashboard the merchant runs it from.
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An agent that builds the store
It reads the merchant's sentence, offers three design directions, then builds the store in front of them. Every change after that is asked for with a sentence in the conversation.
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A store at its own address
One server serves every published store, and each store has its own subdomain on ak7l.com, such as atlas.ak7l.com.
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The merchant's dashboard
At app.ak7l.com the merchant signs in with their email or a Google account, and finds their store and the conversation that built it in one place.
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Products and orders
Products priced in Algerian dinars, and orders that come from the published store into the merchant's dashboard.
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Cash on delivery
The customer orders and pays on receipt, and the merchant sets the delivery price for every wilaya they deliver to.
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Arabic and French
The merchant's dashboard is in Arabic, right to left, with French one click away for those who work in it.
03 The decisions
How we built it
- 01 A unit of its own for every store Every store has its own Durable Object on Cloudflare, which keeps its store, its conversation and its orders, so each store stays independent of the others.
- 02 The conversation is the editor No page editor for the merchant to learn: they build their store with a sentence and change it with a sentence, in the same conversation they started from.
- 03 Arabic first The first language of ak7l is Arabic, from the sentence the merchant writes to the store published for them. Not a foreign interface in translation.
- 04 A shared design system We brought over the design system of another product we built, so we started with ready components, then dressed it in ak7l's identity: ink on warm paper, and no colour but dawn, at its special moments.
From its history
- The first line of ak7l
- An agent that builds the store from the conversation
- The dashboard in Arabic, with French a click away
- Orders, and delivery by wilaya
Where it stands today
ak7l is in its private beta: we open it to merchants batch by batch from the early access list, it is free to use during the beta, and there are no paid subscriptions yet.
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