I watched merchants copy-paste orders into Excel. So I built a fix.

There's a moment in every software project where you see the problem so clearly that you wonder how nobody fixed it sooner.

For Dlvago, that moment came when I saw what merchants were actually doing between Shopify and their shipping companies.

The problem nobody talks about

Shopify makes it easy to run an online store. Shipping companies make it easy to dispatch packages. But between those two systems? There was a gap — and merchants were filling it with copy, paste, and Excel.

The workflow looked something like this:

1. Orders come in on Shopify
2. The merchant (or someone on their team) opens a spreadsheet
3. They manually enter each order — customer name, address, items, weight, notes
4. They send the sheet to their shipping company agent
5. The agent creates the shipments on their platform
6. Everyone waits

This wasn't a rare workaround. It was the standard operating procedure for a large number of merchants working with DLVAgo, a shipping carrier. Every day. For every order.

The problems with this are obvious in hindsight but easy to miss when you're living inside it: orders get missed, data gets mistyped, the process doesn't scale, and it consumes time that should be going into growing the business.

The idea was simple. The execution had to be right.

I wanted to build a bridge. Not a workaround, not a script — a proper integration that a merchant could install, configure, and trust.

The result is Dlvago: a Shopify embedded app that sits directly inside the merchant's Shopify admin and connects their store to the DLVAgo shipping platform.

The app ships with two modes, because one size doesn't fit all merchants:

Automatic send — every order placed on the store is automatically forwarded to DLVAgo the moment it comes in. Zero human steps. For merchants with high volume and predictable products, this is the default.

Manual send — the merchant reviews their orders, selects which ones to push, and sends them in a batch. For merchants who need to verify orders, apply special handling rules, or use partial fulfillment — control stays with them.

Both modes do the same core thing: they eliminate the Excel sheet entirely. The shipping agent gets the data they need, on their platform, in the format they expect — without the merchant ever leaving Shopify.

What it took to build

Building a Shopify embedded app is not like building a regular web app. Shopify has its own auth model (OAuth with session tokens), its own embedded UI framework (App Bridge), and its own approval process. The integration with the shipping side required mapping Shopify's order schema to DLVAgo's API contract — two systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

The stack: NestJS on the backend, Next.js for the embedded frontend, PostgreSQL for persistence, and BullMQ for the job queue that handles order delivery reliably even under load.

Getting it listed on the Shopify App Store added another layer — Shopify reviews apps for security, UX standards, and API compliance before they go live. That process made the product better.

What Dlvago is now

Dlvago is live on the Shopify App Store.

Merchants can install it, connect their DLVAgo account, choose their send mode, and be running in minutes. The orders that used to take someone's afternoon to manually log now move automatically.

The thing I'm most proud of isn't the code. It's that the Excel sheet is gone.

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Dlvago is live on the Shopify App Store. If you're a merchant working with DLVAgo and still managing orders manually — it's worth a look.