A database in the client’s own name

Overview

Kanata Indonesia makes premium ergonomic office furniture and electric standing desks, built in Indonesia. They have a real product, a showroom in Meruya Utara, and a growing audience.

What they did not have was anywhere of their own to sell it.

There is a line in their codebase that states the problem better than we could:

/** Off-site conversion channels — Kanata does not sell on-site. */
export const channels = {
  tokopedia: '…',
  shopee: '…',
  tiktok: '…',
  whatsapp: '…',
}

Every route to a purchase pointed somewhere else. Tokopedia, Shopee, TikTok Shop, or a WhatsApp conversation. The site was a brochure that handed the customer to a platform at the moment of the transaction.

Underneath that, the infrastructure told the same story. The site ran on shared hosting. There was no central database. Order data existed in as many places as there were marketplaces, in whatever shape each platform chose to expose, and nowhere in a form Kanata could ask questions of.

What We Run for Kanata

Four things, and they are deliberately in this order.

A database in their name. We moved them off shared hosting onto AWS with a managed PostgreSQL instance — provisioned as their single source of truth, with daily backups and point-in-time recovery. The account is registered to Kanata. We hold admin.

Their marketplace orders, centralised. An import pipeline pulls orders from the marketplaces into that database in near real time, so for the first time there is one place where the whole business is visible rather than four partial views.

A way to ask it questions. A read-only, token-scoped connection sits on top, so Kanata can query its own data in plain language from its own AI tools. Not a dashboard we built and they have to learn. Their data, answering their questions, in whatever tool they already use.

Content and continuity. A content engine publishing to the site, and a shared knowledge base so what we learn about the business stays written down on both sides.

The part we are proudest of is in the contract

Most agencies will tell you that you own your data. Fewer will write down what happens when the relationship goes wrong, which is the only moment the claim is worth anything.

Kanata's agreement says the AWS account and the PostgreSQL instance are registered in their name. It says their access to that account, that infrastructure, their site and their data cannot be suspended over a billing dispute. It says their storefront and checkout are never taken down for non-payment, at all — only internal tooling can be paused, and only after an invoice is two weeks overdue.

That is a strange thing for a vendor to sign. It is a straightforward thing for an embedded team to sign, because we are not holding the business hostage as a collection strategy.

Conclusion

Kanata is the first client running the full stack: their own database, their own import pipeline, their own query layer, their own knowledge base. The work is in progress and the storefront is not live yet.

But the shape of the argument is already settled, and it is the same one we make to every brand we work with. Marketplaces are a good way to start selling. Keep selling there. Just make sure that somewhere, in an account with your name on it, there is a database that knows who your customers actually are.

Kanata is featured here under the marketing terms of our agreement with them.