8. If I Were You: The Next 90 Days (Oct–Dec 2026)
Date: 30 Sept 2026 · InvoiceBridge (working name) · Back to WHAT-TO-DO-AND-AVOID.md
The single most important thing
Get 10 French Shopify merchants to pay a €49 "reform audit + pilot" by day 45, with a signed partner PA behind it.
- Segment: French Shopify merchants with €100k–5M revenue, ideally with B2B orders (trade, wholesale, pro customers).
- Job: "Make my store compliant with the 2027 reform (e-reporting and e-invoices) and fix what Shopify gets wrong, without changing how I sell."
- How: a concierge pilot. Pull their Shopify orders (a private app or CSV), run the shipping-VAT and numbering checks by hand, show the findings, and send test reports through the partner PA's sandbox. Charge from the first call. Automate only what you've done by hand at least 10 times.
Week-by-week
| Weeks | Goal | Exit criteria |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Partner and discovery. Email 4 white-label PAs (B2Brouter, Iopole, Seqino, FactPulse). Interview 20 French Shopify merchants and 5 experts-comptables. Ask: what their accountant told them, which PA they've chosen (if any), how they handle B2B invoices today, and whether they've checked VAT on shipping. | Partner quotes in hand. The top 3 pains written in the merchants' own French words. |
| 3–4 | Sign and sell. Sign the partner with the best e-reporting API and a price ≤10% of plan price, with a 24-month price lock. Sell the €49 pilot. Get the expert-comptable review of your data mapping booked. | Day 30: partner signed, sandbox working. 5 pilots paid. |
| 5–6 | Run pilots by hand. For each pilot: audit report (shipping VAT, numbering, missing SIREN), B2B/B2C split, test e-reports and e-invoices through the sandbox. | Day 45 kill test: 10 paying pilots full-time, 7 at ~15 hrs/week. If you miss: switch once to B2B-heavy merchants only. Missing twice means stop. |
| 7–10 | Build the thin v1 (Shopify embedded app): order sync with nightly reconciliation, B2B/B2C split, pre-checks, e-reporting on the regime's schedule, B2B e-invoices, rejection alerts, French UI. | Pilots move onto the app. Every report reconciles to Shopify totals. |
| 11–12 | Submit and publish. Submit to the Shopify App Store with French listing copy. Publish the free "Suis-je concerné ?" checker and the shipping-VAT audit tool. Ask every pilot for a review once listed. | Day 90: app submitted, 12 paying (15 hrs/week) / 20 paying (full-time), first 3 accountants using the export. |
Kill criteria (write these down now)
- No partner PA at ≤15% of revenue by day 45: stop. The margin can't work.
- Fewer than 7 paying pilots by day 45, after one segment switch: stop. Merchants will take the free PA.
- Don't respond to a miss by adding platforms or countries. Respond by changing the merchant segment once.
The one thing to stop doing
Stop thinking of this as "a compliance connector for any tool and any mandate".
Every live mandate already has several connectors on every major tool: Stripe → KSeF has 5+, Belgium's Peppol has Stripe and WooCommerce apps, PrestaShop has Pennylane, and WooCommerce has a PA's own plugin. Breadth makes you the weakest option everywhere. One platform, one country, one deadline.
A close second: don't compute VAT. Flag the anomalies and let the merchant or accountant fix them in Shopify.
What stays on the long-term roadmap (only after proof)
- Accountant dashboard across clients (month 4–6).
- OSS and cross-border splits (month 6–9).
- Marketplace flow exclusion for merchants who sync Amazon or Cdiscount into Shopify (after $3k MRR).
- Then, only if Shopify France retains: WooCommerce France. Never another country.