Shopify + AI Automation Engineer to Build a Drop-Ship E-Commerce Business End to End

About us We are an established US cabinet manufacturer and distributor. We are launching a new online store selling kitchen cabinets to contractors and home remodelers. The new company holds no inventory of its own: it sells product from partner suppliers and drop ships it. Order comes in, purchase order goes out, product ships from the supplier. We already have the product photography, product data, and supplier relationships. We have a working AI phone agent and a working AI content pipeline on a sister brand, so several of the hard patterns are already proven and documented. You are extending working systems into a new brand, not inventing from scratch. What we want to build One system, run by software, with as little human labor as possible. There will be one person on our side. The goal is that they rarely have to touch anything. 1. The store. A Shopify store designed and built end to end. Front end design, product catalog, contractor-facing pricing and account tiers, LTL freight quoting at checkout (cabinets ship freight, this is not a small detail), tax and resale certificate handling. 2. The drop-ship engine. This is the heart of it. Customer order comes in, the system creates the sales order and the customer confirmation, then automatically issues a purchase order to the correct supplier for the same goods. Supplier confirms, tracking flows back, the customer gets notified, everything reconciles. Assume some suppliers have an API and some do not, so you will need a plan for email, CSV, and portal-based suppliers too. 3. CRM, funnels, and sequences. HubSpot is already in our stack. Lead capture, lifecycle stages, automated email and SMS sequences, abandoned cart, quote follow-up, reorder prompts. 4. Two buying paths. Some contractors buy on the spot. Others need help: they send measurements, sketches, or photos of the existing kitchen and need a design back before they can sell the job to their customer. Build both. The self-serve cart path, and a design-request intake with a clean workflow, SLA, and a path from finished design straight into a cart or quote. 5. Content and marketing automation. Automated production of static and video content specific to our actual products, using Higgsfield (we already use it) and similar tools. Content must reflect what we truly sell, not generic stock. Automated posting to Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. 6. A weekly brand direction layer. Not just content on a schedule. A recurring process that looks at what competitors are running as ads on comparable sites, and at keyword and search demand, and adjusts the creative direction and messaging for the coming week. We want the machine to notice the market moving. 7. Paid advertising, automated. Build and run campaigns on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook through their APIs: creative rotation, budget shifts, audience testing, performance reporting, and rules that act on results without a human in the loop for routine decisions. We want a system that buys media, not a person who manually buys media. 8. AI phone system. Takes inbound calls, answers product questions, takes orders, and provides order tracking and status. We have a live Retell-based agent on a sister brand you can build from. 9. Site chatbot and inbound email handling. Both routed through the CRM, both able to resolve the routine cases without a human, both able to escalate cleanly when they should. Bookkeeping stays with our accountant. But you are responsible for the plumbing: sales, vendor bills, COGS, fees, and tax data flowing cleanly into QuickBooks Online so that per-order margin is real and visible. Who we are looking for A builder who thinks in systems. Someone who has personally shipped an e-commerce store AND the automation stack behind it, not someone who has only done one of those. You should be comfortable with Shopify, APIs, webhooks, automation platforms, AI agents, and the ad platform APIs. We know this is a lot for one person. Here is our position: we want ONE contract and ONE point of accountability. If you have a partner or a small team you work with regularly, apply as a unit with yourself as the lead. What we do not want is to manage three vendors and own the seams between them. How we will work - Short paid trial project first, so we can both see how it goes before committing. - Then fixed-price milestones. Each milestone is a working thing we can click on, not a status report. - One live demo per week, screen shared, on the real system. - Budget is $15,000 fixed for the full build, and we see it as a 4 to 6 week project for the right person. The paid trial is separate and additional, not taken out of that. Ad spend is ours and separate, so do not quote it into your number. - If your read on the scope or the timeline is wildly different from ours, tell us why in your application. We would rather hear it now than in month three, and a well-argued disagreement will not cost you the job. - We move fast and we are decisive. We will not slow you down. We expect the same. - Long-term relationship for whoever builds this. Once it is live, it needs an owner. To apply Skip the template. We will read the ones that are clearly written for us. 1. Start your reply with the word CABINET so we know you read this. 2. Link two things you actually built: one e-commerce store, one automation or AI system. Tell us specifically what part was yours. 3. Answer this: a supplier we drop ship from has no API and no EDI. They take purchase orders by email and send back confirmations as PDF attachments. How would you automate that end to end, and where does it break? 4. Answer this: what is the first thing you would build in week one, and why that first? 5. Tell us which parts of the scope above you are strongest at, and which part you are weakest at. We will trust the answer more than a claim to be great at all of it. 6. How you would break the $15,000 across milestones, and your honest estimate of the timeline to a live store taking real orders. If you think the scope is worth more than $15,000, say so and tell us which parts you would deliver for it.