QEG Automation — the machine that ran 77 storefronts
A managed-service business running US Walmart marketplace stores for client owners, fulfilled from Amazon, on a custom platform I had built and a ~35-person ops team hired in eight weeks.
FounderOps at scaleInternal platformHiring machine
- Role
- Founder — platform, team, operations, client economics.
- Timeline
- 2022 — 2023 founder memory
- Status
- Sold founder memory.
- Scale
- 77 client stores · 204,559 live listings · ~35-person ops team.
- Tech
- Custom PHP + MySQL platform · Amazon MWS + Walmart Marketplace APIs · competitive repricer · 14 cron jobs · order & tracking automation.
$593K
peak monthly GMV (Aug 2021) — GMV, not revenue
17,583
orders processed in that month
204,559
live listings under management
The business model was dropshipping. We created stores on Walmart.com and listed products priced 30–40% higher than the same items on Amazon.com. Whenever a confirmed order came in on Walmart, we placed that order on Amazon and had it shipped directly to the customer — the spread between the two prices was the margin. A typical dropshipping model; our innovation was the software we built to run it.
The platform
The numbers, labeled honestly
Peak observable month: August 2021 — $593,653 in Walmart GMV on 17,583 orders, with a $48,637 peak day. Behind that volume was a team of 35 managing every one of those orders day to day, with supervisors tiered above them overseeing the operation.
The learnings
- Complex systems are built in the long tail. The core pipeline worked early; the long-tail edge cases took the longest by far — that last stretch is most of what "production-ready" actually means.
- A business that relies 100% on one platform is susceptible to collapse. Every listing, order, and dollar routed through Walmart's marketplace; when the channel turned, the whole machine stopped with it.
- Build redundancy for every API you depend on. External calls fail — the ASIN→UPC step ran two vendors in series because neither alone had coverage, and every critical dependency needs that kind of fallback.