The Local by Masrawy

This is a concept. It has not been published, so none of what follows reflects a live product. The Local, a café, butcher, and market in Mississauga, was on UberEats and paying commission on every order, with no way to know who their customers actually were. The idea was to explore what a direct ordering channel could look like for a business in that position.

The concept is a Progressive Web App that would live on the customer's home screen, no App Store involved. Browse the full menu across three product lines, place a pickup order, earn loyalty points, and reorder your usual in a couple of taps. The prototype below is fully interactive.

Most of their digital orders were going through third-party delivery apps. That meant a commission cut on every transaction, no customer data, and no way to build any kind of relationship with regulars. People who came in three times a week were essentially strangers in the system.

There was also no pickup ordering option at all. If you wanted to grab something on your lunch break, you either showed up and waited or called ahead. For a busy spot, that's a real friction point worth designing around.

A PWA made more sense than a native app for a few practical reasons. There's no app store submission process, no review cycles, and no 30% cut going to Apple or Google. Updates ship instantly. And for a customer who's never heard of the app before, installing it is as simple as tapping "Add to Home Screen" from the browser.

The stack is React, TypeScript, and Supabase on the backend. Supabase handled auth, the database, and row-level security, which meant no custom server to maintain. Tailwind kept the UI consistent without a lot of overhead.

Loyalty points on the home screen

Points are visible the moment you open the app, not tucked away in a Rewards tab. The thinking was simple: if customers don't see their balance regularly, they forget it exists. Putting it front and center makes the program feel real without any extra taps.

Order Again

The home screen pulls in the customer's recent order items so they can reorder with one tap. For regulars who get the same coffee and pastry every morning, this cuts the whole flow from two minutes to about five seconds. Adding an item from that section shows a quick toast confirmation so it feels responsive without interrupting anything.

Pickup only

Delivery isn't set up on their end yet, so we didn't add a delivery option. Instead of showing a disabled toggle or a greyed-out field, we just didn't put it there. The checkout goes straight to pickup time selection. It's a simpler flow and there's nothing to confuse anyone.

Home

Personalized welcome with your first name, current points balance, and your recent orders ready to reorder.

This is a concept. The codebase is a working PWA with real ordering, cart, and rewards logic built on Supabase, but it has not been published or connected to a live business. It has not been used for real pickup orders.

A few things stood out on this one. PWA is genuinely underrated for local businesses. The install experience is good enough, updates happen silently, and you're not splitting revenue with a platform on every transaction.

The pickup-only constraint actually made the concept better. Removing the delivery path simplified the checkout significantly. Sometimes the right call is just not building the thing.

This was a full end-to-end concept, from working through what a business in this position actually needs to designing and building a functional prototype around it. It has not been published. The goal was never to build the most feature-rich ordering app, but to show what the right one could look like for a business at this stage.