Consumer SME Stack Map — Where Each Tool Fits

Do not copy the tools. Copy the roles.

The reference stack uses specific vendors. Your company may not.

That is fine. The architecture is not “use Shopify, Klaviyo, and this exact accounting tool.” The architecture is “your AI operating layer needs reliable access to the systems that play these roles.”

If you copy vendor names without understanding roles, you will overfit. If you map roles clearly, you can adapt the playbook to beauty, food, home, wellness, pet, outdoor, fashion, retail, or any other physical-products SME.

The map

Role	What it owns	Common options
Ecommerce source of truth	Orders, products, customers, discounts, refunds, web revenue	Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, custom storefront
POS / retail	Store orders, staff sales, locations, cash register events	Shopify POS, Lightspeed, Square, Cegid, custom POS
Inventory / ERP	Stock, warehouses, transfers, purchase orders, COGS	Stockagile, Cin7, Katana, Odoo, NetSuite, ERPNext, custom ERP
Accounting	Invoices, chart of accounts, P&L, tax, payables	Holded, Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, A3, NetSuite
Expense management	Cards, receipts, approvals, reimbursements	Payhawk, Pleo, Spendesk, Ramp, Brex
Helpdesk	Customer tickets, conversations, tags, SLA	Richpanel, Gorgias, Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk
Email/SMS lifecycle	Campaigns, flows, segments, attributed revenue	Klaviyo, Attentive, Mailchimp, Braze, Customer.io
Ads	Spend, campaign structure, creative, platform metrics	Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, Pinterest, Amazon Ads
Analytics	Web sessions, conversion, channel analysis	GA4, Plausible, PostHog, Triple Whale, Northbeam
Search visibility	Queries, pages, indexing, AI search audits	Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Semrush, custom GEO trackers
Logistics / 3PL	Fulfillment, tracking, returns, inbounds	ShipBob, ShipStation, warehouse APIs, 3PL portals
Workspace	Email, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar	Google Workspace, Microsoft 365
Team chat	Operational alerts, digests, escalations	Slack, Teams, Discord
Knowledge base	Company brain, docs, skills, patterns, memory	Markdown repo, Notion export, Drive docs, internal wiki
AI tool interface	Human access to brain/tools/agents	Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex, internal app
MCP/tool server	Secure bridge between AI and systems	FastMCP, custom API service, Zapier/N8N as transitional layer
Runtime / queues	Event processing, review queues, traces	Filesystem queues, Redis, Postgres, Temporal, custom daemon

Source-of-truth rules

Every metric should have one owner.

Sales usually come from ecommerce/POS, not web analytics. Web analytics is useful for sessions and channel behavior, but it misses offline, delayed, blocked, and platform-specific data. Accounting owns financial close. Inventory owns stock. Helpdesk owns ticket state. Email owns campaign sends. Ads own spend but not final truth on revenue.

Write this down. Many AI mistakes are source-of-truth mistakes disguised as reasoning mistakes.

Integration priority

Connect in this order:

1. Brain and docs.
2. Ecommerce orders/products/customers.
3. Helpdesk.
4. Inventory or ERP.
5. Accounting/invoices.
6. Email marketing.
7. Ads and analytics.
8. Workspace/calendar/drive.
9. Logistics and partner systems.

The order reflects operational leverage. A customer-service agent without order access is weak. A finance workflow without invoices is theater. A marketing agent without contribution margin will optimize for vanity.

Vendor alternatives by vertical

A food business may need batch/lot traceability and expiry before advanced marketing analytics. A beauty business may need claims and ingredient documentation. A home business may need bulky freight and replacement-parts workflows. A pet business may need subscription and sizing logic. An outdoor business may need warranty, repair, and seasonal demand planning.

The stack map should make those vertical differences explicit while preserving the common architecture.

What not to integrate first

Do not start with the hardest proprietary vendor. Do not start with bank payments. Do not start with payroll mutations. Do not start with autonomous ad-budget writes. Do not start with every Slack channel.

Start with read access to the systems that answer daily questions. Then draft. Then approve. Then bounded writes.

Limitations

Some vendors have poor APIs. Some require manual exports. Some data is messy. Some systems disagree because they define the same word differently. A stack map will not solve that. It will surface it.

That is useful. Once the disagreement is visible, you can decide which source wins for which decision.

How to start this in your business

1. Create a one-page stack map with roles, vendors, owners, API/export method, and source-of-truth rules.
2. Mark each integration as read-ready, export-only, manual, or unavailable.
3. Connect the brain, ecommerce, helpdesk, and one finance source before adding advanced systems.
4. For every dashboard or agent answer, require source citation: which system produced the number?
5. Fork integrations/_stack-map.md as the artifact.