Package forwarding from Florida to Roatan, Honduras — managed end to end
Max Shipping is a parcel and freight forwarding company that ships packages from a warehouse in Florida to customers on Roatan, Honduras. Customers in Roatan order goods online from US retailers, have them delivered to Max's Florida warehouse, and Max consolidates and ships them to the island.
The business handles hundreds of packages at a time. Each package needs to be received, measured, assigned to a customer, loaded into a shipping container, shipped across the Caribbean, unloaded, invoiced, and handed to the customer. Before this system existed, all of that was tracked manually.
MaxShipping (the software) is the custom logistics platform we built to manage this entire process digitally — from the moment a package arrives at the Florida warehouse to the moment a customer picks it up in Roatan.
The system eliminates manual spreadsheet tracking and gives every stakeholder — from warehouse scanner to end customer — a real-time view of where packages are in the pipeline.
All four systems share a single Cloud Firestore database. When one system writes data, the others see it immediately:
Every package follows this path from Florida to Roatan:
| Layer | Technology | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Web dashboard | Flutter Web (Dart) | Shares code patterns with the mobile app |
| Mobile scanner | Flutter (Android) | Native camera access for barcode scanning |
| Website / portal | Static HTML/CSS/JS | Simple, no build step, easy to deploy |
| Database | Cloud Firestore | Real-time sync across all apps |
| Backend logic | Firebase Cloud Functions (Node.js 20) | Serverless, auto-scales, triggers on data changes |
| Payments | Square API | Invoice creation and payment processing |
| Nodemailer via Hostinger SMTP | Daily/weekly reports, alerts, invoice delivery | |
| Auth | Firebase Authentication | Email/password for staff and customers |
| Chatbot | n8n webhook | Customer support on the landing page |
| Data | Location |
|---|---|
| All operational data (packages, clients, invoices, containers) | Cloud Firestore — project max-inventory-scanner-b0b53 |
| Package images and attachments | Firebase Storage |
| Payment records | Square (synced from Firestore via Cloud Functions) |
| Email credentials and API keys | functions/.env on Firebase |
| Environment | Firebase Project ID | Alias |
|---|---|---|
| Production | max-inventory-scanner-b0b53 | max-production |
| Development | max-shipping-development | maxshipping |
| Component | GitHub Repo |
|---|---|
| MaxTracks Web + Cloud Functions | OmelasAI/maxshipping-web-and-cloudfunctions |
| MaxTracks Scanner (mobile) | OmelasAI/maxshipping-scanner |
| Website + Customer Portal | OmelasAI/maxshipping-info-and-customer-tracking-page |