Launching Make My Shop: An Open-Source Telegram E-Commerce & CRM Platform
I’m excited to share Make My Shop — an open-source Telegram e-commerce platform and lightweight CRM designed to launch fully functional online stores directly within Telegram in minutes.
While Telegram is becoming a primary sales channel for many businesses, managing orders, catalogs, and customer communication manually often creates unnecessary friction. Make My Shop solves this by providing a complete automated storefront out of the box.
Core Capabilities
Product Catalog & Search: Category-based navigation, real-time product search, rich media cards, and direct manager communication routing.
Interactive Shopping Cart: Live cart item counter, structured multi-step checkout, shipping address capture, and automated order total calculation.
Payment Verification: Streamlined customer receipt uploading (photo/text) paired with real-time admin payment confirmation workflows.
Embedded Order Chat: Isolated 1-on-1 messaging thread embedded directly within each order detail card for seamless customer-manager clarification.
Merchant Control Panel: Complete CRUD interface for product catalog management, order status tracking, and instant new order event notifications.
Native Localization: On-the-fly, edit-in-place interface switching across English, Spanish, and Russian.
Technical Architecture
Backend & Framework: Python 3.12, aiogram 3.x, Pydantic v2
Persistence & Database: Async SQLAlchemy 2.0 (PostgreSQL / SQLite), Alembic schema migrations
Execution Model: Fully non-blocking background task execution (asyncio), structured service layer, and comprehensive integration testing.
The project is completely open-source, lightweight, and ready for self-hosting.

I recently learned that some agencies work directly inside their clients’ CRMs, and it got me wondering how data confidentiality works in practice. You’re basically handling customer information, sales records, and other business data that don’t belong to you.
For those who do this, what safeguards do you typically have in place? Do clients set specific rules around access, data handling, governance and confidentiality, or is it mostly handled informally, especially with smaller businesses? What scale of businesses even do this mostly?

Sometimes switching is the right call. Some tools really do fit how modern teams work better. But the most common mistake I see is migrating the same messy structure into a new tool and getting the same result.

A migration is a great opportunity to fix how your CRM is set up. These are some of the issues I see most that stop AI and automations from working consistently:

1. One pipeline for everything or one too many pipelines when a custom field for filtering would suffice.
2. Free-text fields that lead to inconsistent data that is hard to build automations around and surface reports.
3. Duplicate records.
4. The important stuff is in notes so it's impossible for an automation to act on it.

AI can help with messy data if you ask it to, but if you want to build automations that run without you and actually work consistently you need a strong foundation in place.

Whether you’re staying put or moving, fixing these makes your AI tools, automations and reports noticeably more useful. If you’re migrating, it’s much easier to do it on the way over than after.m

Link to a free session if you want to go deeper on any of this.

Anyone here switched CRMs and found the same problems followed them?

Hey everyone,

I’ve worked as a copywriter and content marketer for a few years. With AI changing so much on the writing side, I’m trying to move toward the more digital, technical side of marketing.

I was already writing a lot of emails back then, and I’d also done HubSpot’s free certifications, so lifecycle marketing felt like a natural fit. Over the last three months I freelanced in Mailchimp (the project is finished now), and I built my own automations in Brevo for a personal project.

Now I’m trying to figure out what to do next to become a stronger candidate for jobs, and honestly I feel a bit lost:

• What kind of roles should I be aiming for at this stage (e.g. email marketing specialist, CRM executive, lifecycle associate, marketing automation), and which ones have more opportunities right now?
• Should I go deeper into email marketing specifically, or broaden into CRM in general, like learning other CRM platforms?
• What skills or experience actually make someone stand out when hiring for lifecycle/CRM roles?
• Are there any guides, courses or certifications you’d recommend?

I’ve also put together a portfolio of what I’ve done so far and would love feedback on it. Happy to share the link in the comments if that’s allowed here.

Would really appreciate any advice from people who’ve made a similar move or who hire for these roles.

Thanks!