Scaleside
A Miami-based operator running a $10M-a-year e-commerce business had proof in his own sales data: shoppers commit to high-consideration products more readily when they can try them first. Scaleside turns that insight into a platform any Shopify merchant can use. Reliqio took over a stalled build, reset the product strategy, and shipped the MVP to production in about 2.5 months.
Read the full Scaleside story: https://reliqio.com/case-studies/scaleside
Challenge
"Try Before You Buy" - sounds simple to a shopper: pay for shipping, use the product, and pay the full price only if it stays. Behind that promise sits one of the harder problems in e-commerce payments. The card has to be held at checkout, held again when the trial ends, then charged, refunded, or released depending on what the customer decides. The trial clock can't start at purchase either. It has to wait until the order is delivered.
Solution
We began with a full audit of the existing codebase. Two to three weeks of discovery reset the feature scope and produced a prioritized roadmap with budget estimates, so the client knew what would ship, in what order, and at what cost.
Design came next: two weeks to give the product a coherent interface in Figma. The previous team was then phased out gradually, so development never stopped during the handover.
The MVP is a merchant-agnostic SaaS built around three pieces:
- A funnel builder where each offer moves through landing, checkout, upsell, downsell, and thank-you steps, with products synced from Shopify and a drag-and-drop template editor that can generate templates with AI
- Payment orchestration that handles pre-authorization, reauthorization after the trial, capture, refund, and void, with all card data tokenized and none stored on Reliqio servers
- A merchant dashboard with conversion analytics, order management, and fraud alerts
The platform reached production roughly 2.5 months after development started.
Results
The platform is live. The client runs $5,000 a day in advertising, and paying customers already buy through the Try Before You Buy model.
By removing upfront purchase risk, the model targets cart abandonment on products priced at $50-100 and above. Higher conversion means each advertising dollar brings in more customers, which lowers effective CAC.
In place of an unusable frontend, the client now has a professionally designed interface, a template builder merchants can use without developers, and streamlined checkout flows.
Full metrics are still being collected as the platform scales. The next phase adds subscriptions and a customer portal to grow LTV and repeat purchases.
Payments that wait for the customer
The hardest part of the platform is invisible to shoppers. At checkout, the card is pre-authorized rather than charged. When the trial ends, the platform reauthorizes it, then captures the full amount, refunds, or voids the hold based on the customer's decision. The trial starts only once the order is delivered, synced with the Shopify order lifecycle. All card data is tokenized through the payment providers, which keeps the platform PCI DSS compliant with no card numbers stored.
AI where merchants feel it
Merchants don't need a designer to launch an offer. Inside the template builder, AI generates landing page and checkout templates they can edit and publish. The team also used AI across development for coding, documentation, and design work.
Technologies & Tools
Project Details
2026
8 months
$50K – $100K
7 people
