The brief arrived in July with a deadline in September. A wholesaler with 4,120 SKUs wanted to sell direct for the first time. They had supplier spec sheets, warehouse photographs, and not one line of customer-facing copy — because for fifteen years, writing it had been someone else's job.
Homeware wholesaler · 4,120 SKUs · Nova Commerce + Merchant Copilot · catalog live in one weekend, store trading in eleven days.
The situation
Two quotes were already on the table. An agency had priced a bespoke storefront at fourteen weeks. A copywriting studio had quoted eleven weeks for the descriptions alone, running in parallel — which still put the launch three weeks past the season they were chasing.
The storefront was never the blocker. Storefronts are a solved problem. The blocker was four thousand empty description fields and no realistic way to fill them by hand.
The weekend
The store itself took a day. Nova Commerce went onto their own cloud account on the Friday, with the catalog imported from the spreadsheet their warehouse system already exported.
Saturday was the catalog pass, and the input decided everything. Rather than generating from product titles — which produces four thousand interchangeable paragraphs — Merchant Copilot read the supplier specification sheets: dimensions, materials, care instructions, box contents. Every listing was written from the facts of that specific product, with the metadata pass running behind it as a checklist.
Sunday and Monday were review. Sorted by expected revenue, the top two hundred products were read line by line by their own product manager and edited where the tone was off. The remaining 3,900 were approved in batches from the queue. Nothing shipped unread by category, and nothing waited on a perfect read of every item.
What happened after launch
The shop agent went on in week two, connected to stock and the order table. It turned out to matter most on exactly the products the team had worried about — large furniture, where every shopper has a measurement question and nobody wants to email about it.
The results
The part we thought was impossible turned out to be the part that took two days. — Head of Ecommerce
The pattern
When a launch is late for a seasonal reason, the platform is almost never what is late. Put up a storefront you own on day one, then spend the saved weeks on the catalog — the only part nobody else can do for you, and the part an agent can finally help with.
Golam Mostafa wrote the code behind these results. Planning something similar? Talk it through first.