Try Before You Buy checkout for e-commerce merchants.

Scaleside is a B2B SaaS e-commerce platform that enables Shopify merchants to offer “Try Before You Buy” — customers pay only shipping upfront, use the product during a trial period, then get billed the full amount. It's a funnel builder with integrated payment orchestration, designed to increase conversion rates for high-consideration products ($50–100+). The client, a Miami-based operator running a $10M/year e-commerce business, validated the TBYB concept through his own sales data before commissioning the platform.

platform

Web (Responsive)

verticals

B2B, eCommerce, Fintech, AI

team & duration

~7 FTEs, ~8 months

services

Digital product strategy, Digital product management, Digital product development

Challenge.

Client challenge. The client had a working business concept validated by real revenue, but the previous development team had spent 6–7 months building features in isolation without product vision — backend-only work, no design, no systemic architecture, and an unusable frontend. The team lacked an understanding of how the platform should function as a whole. The client needed a partner that could own full product strategy and delivery.

Technical challenges. Payment orchestration complexity — pre-authorization holds, capture, refund and void flows across Authorize.net and PayPal. PCI DSS compliance via tokenization, with no card data stored. Shopify order lifecycle synchronization, where trials must start after product delivery rather than at purchase. Checkout conversion optimization. Integrating GrapesJS as a template builder to avoid building one from scratch and save the client budget.

Solution.

Reliqio conducted a full codebase audit of the existing system, redefined the feature scope over 2–3 weeks of discovery, and created a prioritized roadmap with budget estimates. Execution followed a phased approach: discovery and planning, UI/UX design (2 weeks), gradual migration from the previous team, MVP development, and production deployment. Built a merchant-agnostic SaaS with a multi-step offer and funnel builder (landing → checkout → upsell → downsell → thank you), payment tokenization via PayPal Vault and Authorize.net Profiles, and a dashboard with conversion analytics. The previous team was gradually offboarded and replaced. The MVP shipped to production in approximately 2.5 months from development start.

Impact.

The platform is live in production. The client runs $5,000/day in advertising and already has paying customers using the Try Before You Buy model.

Conversion — the core value proposition directly targets cart abandonment for high-doubt products. By removing upfront purchase risk, the model is designed to significantly increase conversion rates.

CAC — lower effective CAC, because higher conversion means each advertising dollar produces more customers.

LTV and retention — not yet measured. Future features, including subscriptions via a Loop.co integration and a customer portal, will directly target LTV and repeat purchase behaviour.

UX — a substantial improvement over the previous team's output. A professional Figma-designed UI, a GrapesJS-powered drag-and-drop template builder with AI-generated templates, and streamlined checkout flows replaced an unusable frontend.

Quantified metrics are still being gathered as the platform scales.

Features.

Dashboard: conversion rates, order volume, 7+ analytics metrics, blocked cards and fraud alerts, critical orders requiring admin attention, date range filtering.

Offers (funnel builder): multi-step funnels configurable per product. Each step has a type, template, product assignment synced from Shopify, and ordering. GrapesJS template builder with AI-powered template generation. Step-level and offer-level custom code injection for analytics (Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity and others).

Offer settings: favicon, subdomain management via Railway and Cloudflare, geo-targeting to show offers only in specific regions, offer-level analytics.

Orders: order list with filters and statuses. Order detail view with status, customer info, shipping and billing addresses, and timeline. Actions for capture, refund and void authorization.

Customers: customer table with individual detail pages.

Payment orchestration: pre-authorization holds at purchase, reauthorization after the trial period, capture or refund based on trial outcome. PCI DSS compliant — all card data tokenized via PayPal Vault and Authorize.net Profiles, with no credit card data stored on Reliqio servers.

Authentication: Firebase Authentication.

Settings: organization settings (subdomains, store name, logo, email templates) and profile settings for account management. Currently supports the merchant/admin role, with additional roles planned.