Building PsaLinks: Commerce Platform for Southeast Asia
How PsaLinks helps restaurants, shops, and service businesses in Southeast Asia run storefronts, POS, and operations in one place.
Most commerce software is built for a market that has stable internet, accepts cards everywhere, and expects next-day delivery. Southeast Asia is not that market. Cash on delivery is the default. WhatsApp is the support channel. A shop owner runs the POS, the social media, and the deliveries from one phone. PsaLinks is built for that owner.
Storefronts that work on a phone
The storefront is the first thing a customer sees, and it is almost always opened on a phone, often on a slow connection. PsaLinks storefronts are PWA-first, ship under 200KB of JS, and work offline for browsing a cached catalog. Images are served at the size the screen needs, not the size the camera produced.
POS and inventory in one flow
The POS is not a separate app from the storefront. A sale made at the counter decrements the same inventory a customer sees online. This sounds obvious and is surprisingly rare in the platforms small businesses here actually use. The result of splitting them is overselling, which is the fastest way to lose a customer's trust.
- Single inventory source across online and in-store.
- Cash and card treated as first-class, not cash as a fallback.
- Khmer and English UI with i18n baked in from day one.
- WhatsApp deep links for order confirmations and support.
Payments without assumptions
Stripe is available, but it is not the default. Most orders are paid on delivery in cash. The payment model treats cash, bank transfer, and card as equal citizens. The order state machine knows about paid, unpaid, and partially-paid, because partial payment on delivery is common here.
Build for the phone in the owner's hand, the cash in the customer's pocket, and the connection that drops at the worst moment. Everything else is a bonus.