From a WhatsApp Group to a Custom Delivery App
An alkaline water round run out of a WhatsApp group, replaced by one bespoke app that handles customers, payments, delivery days and van routes.
- Client
- AlkaFIT Ltd - alkaline water delivery
- Location
- Lancashire
- Sector
- Direct-to-door delivery / drinks
- What we built
- A bespoke, mobile-first delivery management app
- Built with
- Next.js, Supabase, Tailwind CSS, Twilio, Google Maps, Vercel
- Status
- Live and used on every delivery round
What was broken before we started
AlkaFIT are two lads from Lancashire - Gavin and Josh - selling bottled alkaline water and delivering it straight to people's doors. Five litre bottles up to twenty litre bottles, two delivery days a week, Monday and Thursday, covering a growing patch across the county.
They started the way most good small businesses start: with a van, a phone and a lot of graft. Orders came in through their social media DMs. And that's exactly where the trouble started.
Every order that came in off Instagram or Facebook got copied into a WhatsApp group. That group was the business. It was the order book. It was the payment ledger. It was the delivery schedule. It was the stock list. It was the customer database. All of it, scrolling away up the screen, mixed in with everything else two brothers-in-law say to each other during a working week.
Which meant the same set of questions every single delivery day. Who's actually ordered this week? How much water do we need to fill before we set off? Who paid last time, who still owes, and how much? Who's a regular and who was just a one-off? And in what order do we actually drive this?
That last one was the real killer. Route planning was being done by hand - and at one point by pasting addresses into ChatGPT, which sent them criss-crossing back and forth across Lancashire, past the same street three times in a morning. Fuel, hours and patience, all going out the window before the first bottle was on a doorstep.
None of this was a business problem. The business was working. It was an admin problem - and it was quietly capping how many doors they could get on.
The solution
A single app. One place where the whole delivery round lives. The brief we set ourselves was simple and slightly brutal: it has to work in a van, on a phone, with cold hands, in the rain, with no training and no manual. If a feature needed explaining, it wasn't going in. So everything is big buttons, big text, colour-coded status and one clear job per screen. Green means paid. Blue means planned. Red means owing. You open it and you know what to do.
Every Customer in One Place
Name, address, postcode, phone, notes, what they order and what day they want it. No more scrolling back through chat history to find someone's door number. Customers are marked Regular or One-off, which gives Gavin an instant view of who's locked into a repeat order and who isn't - a sales tool as much as an admin one.
Delivery Days That Build Themselves
Set someone up as a regular - say 3 x 20 LTR every Monday - and they appear automatically on every Monday delivery list from then on. Nobody re-enters anything. Weekly, fortnightly and monthly orders are all handled, with one-off orders sitting on top for anyone ordering as and when.
The Daily Job List
Open the app on a Monday morning and you get Monday's stops. Thursday, you get Thursday's. Each job shows the customer, address, postcode, order and any notes - gate round the back, leave in the porch, that sort of thing. Tap to mark delivered. Tap to mark paid. Done.
Visible Payment Tracking
Paid and unpaid are colour-coded across the whole app, so money owed can't hide. No more scrolling a chat thread trying to work out whether someone squared up three weeks ago.
One-Tap Route Planning
Tap Plan Route and the app takes every stop on that day's list, works out the genuinely most efficient order to drive them, and hands each driver a Google Maps link they just tap and follow. Starts at the depot, ends where it should. No more driving past the same street twice.
Multi-Van Splitting
Choose one, two or three vans and the day's stops are split between them, each with its own optimised route. Long rounds are automatically broken into Part 1 of 2 style links, because Google Maps quietly drops stops past a certain number.
Know What to Load Before You Leave
Before the vans go out, the app totals the day's order into a plain breakdown - 12 x 20 LTR, 4 x 10 LTR - and splits it per van. The right amount of water goes on the right van, first time. No guessing, no coming back to the depot mid-round.
Text Your Customers With One Tap
A single button sends every customer on that day's list a text to say their water's on the way, powered by Twilio. Fewer missed deliveries, fewer 'you weren't in' trips, and it makes a two-man operation look like a proper outfit.
Pause a Customer
Going away for a fortnight? Tap pause, pick one week, two weeks or until further notice, and that customer drops off the delivery list for that window, then comes back on automatically. They don't get texted while they're away either. Small feature - saves a wasted stop every single time it's used.
The route planner looked finished until we tested it against a full round. Google Maps quietly drops stops once a route passes a certain number of waypoints - so a long Monday would have silently lost deliveries off the end of the list. We caught it before it went live and built automatic splitting into Part 1 of 2 style links instead. That's the difference between a demo and something you can hand to a driver at half seven on a wet Monday morning.
Built for a van, not a desk
Big buttons, big text, colour-coded status and one clear job per screen. Everything below is the live app, running on a phone, on an actual delivery round. Customer names and addresses are blurred - real customer detail stays off the internet.
Two delivery days a week, a growing patch across Lancashire, and a round that used to live in a WhatsApp group.
Monday's stops, the litres to load before you set off, and route planning and customer texts one tap away.
A customer set to 20 LTR every Monday, holiday pause controls, and every delivery there to mark paid.
What actually changed
Orders, payments, customers, stock and routes all living in one WhatsApp group. Routes planned by hand - or by pasting addresses into ChatGPT - sending the vans back and forth across the same roads.
One app holding the whole round. Delivery lists build themselves, litres are totalled and split per van before the vans leave, money owed is visible at a glance, customers get a text before every drop, and the route is one tap.
The app is in use on every round. It's had feature after feature added since it went live, usually off the back of a message from the van.
The app is built to grow with them. On the list for future phases:
- Card and Direct Debit payment collection
- Customers ordering and managing their own account online
- Courier integration for orders going outside the local round
- Stock management and deeper reporting
"Originally we started this business taking orders off socials and having to write them down in a what's app group, manage everything manually, payments, who owes and how much water we need to fill and plan delivery routes etc. we reached out to Lancashire web fixers too create our own app/work hub and we can't tell you how much it has made everything so much simpler, we've now got everything in one place where we can keep track off payments, orders, how many litres on what day. It also plans our delivery route for us so we are not going back and forth on ourself (chat gpt had us all over previously). If we ever need help with something or need something changing they've always been really helpful and managed to fix the problem instantly, would really recommend anyone struggling with anything to give them a call and see where they can help to improve your business."
AlkaFITAlkaFIT Ltd · via Google Reviews
"Excellent service and support around the clock, always quick to help and nothing is ever too much trouble. Andrew has made a massive difference to how we run things day to day, saving us time and making everything much easier to manage. Any changes or new features we've asked for have been sorted quickly, and he's always on hand if we need help. Reliable, knowledgeable and genuinely great to deal with. Brilliant service from start to finish and we'd definitely recommend him to anyone."
Gavin and JoshAlkaFIT Ltd · via Google Reviews
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