ASaabForever

The business

ASaabForever sells Saab parts: genuine Saab OEM parts, new old stock, quality aftermarket parts, and used and remanufactured components, for every Saab model from the 900 and 9000 through the 9-3, 9-5, 9-2X, 9-4X and 9-7X. It sells on eBay and on its own Shopify store at asaabforever.com, and ships to buyers in the US and overseas. The business is based in Columbus, Ohio.

The problem

Before the hub, the work lived in several places. Labels were bought through ShippingEasy, which was charging more for postage than we wanted to pay. eBay and Shopify each held their own version of stock, listings and prices, with paid connector tools between them. Shelf locations, barcodes and many product records sat inside the shipping tool rather than in anything the business owned.

The goal: one system the business owns that holds the truth about parts, stock, orders, shipping and profit, with eBay and Shopify following it.

What we built

The ASaabForever Ops Hub is a web application built for this one business.

Stock. Receiving against purchase orders, bin locations with barcode labels printed on a thermal printer, cycle counts with a queue that puts the riskiest shelves first, and reconciliation that compares what the hub holds with what each channel is showing. An eBay SKU map shows every live eBay listing, the part it draws stock from, and the chain of superseded part numbers behind it.

Buying. Purchase orders, reorder planning and supplier management. A supplier’s PO can be uploaded as a PDF or a photo; the hub reads the lines, flags part numbers it does not recognize, and writes nothing until someone confirms.

Listing. Staff photograph a part or scan its UPC. The hub reads part numbers and barcodes off the photos, suggests what the part is, its condition and its attributes, and hands a drafted listing to a person for review. Fitment, supersession data and the factory parts diagram sit with each part.

Selling. eBay and Shopify orders arrive in one order list. Market and competitor prices feed a price review queue, and no price change goes out to eBay until someone approves it. Returns have their own workflow.

Shipping. Rates and labels come through Veeqo. The label and a packing slip print on the thermal printer, and tracking goes back to eBay or Shopify. Parcel insurance is booked only after a label has actually printed, and carrier claims are tracked from filing to payment.

Knowing the numbers. Profit by order and by channel, including estimated marketplace fees, sales analytics, shipping margin, and an aging report that shows slow movers and the value tied up in them.

How it runs

The hub is in production at app.asaabforever.com and is self-hosted. Staff sign in, and each role (admin, manager, staff, warehouse, lister, accounting, reporting) sees the screens for its job.

More than 30 scheduled jobs keep it current. New eBay and Shopify orders are pulled every 15 minutes. Tracking from orders shipped outside the hub is pulled every 20 minutes. Stock on Shopify is checked and corrected every 5 minutes, and on eBay every 10 minutes, besides the push after each sale. Supplier stock and cost refresh several times a day, and the database is backed up four times a day. Changes go to a staging copy before a manual deploy.

The AI runs on local models on the same hardware: a vision model reads part photos and labels, and a local embedding model powers search. Alongside the hub, the business keeps a Saab knowledge base built from the factory parts catalog and workshop manuals, about 149,000 documents, as a research reference. The hub is still under active development, with new work most days.