For ecommerce brands

Polaris for ecommerce brands

You staff for peak and pay for it in February, or you staff for February and suffer in November.

The short answer

Ecommerce workload is lumpy: product launches, seasonal campaigns and support volume that multiplies for six weeks and then collapses. Fixed headcount and per-seat software do not follow that curve. Polaris keeps the workspace free year-round and bills roughly two dollars per human-hour an AI worker delivers, so a quiet month costs nothing and a peak month costs what the work was worth.

Cost in a quiet month: $0 if nothing is delivered
Connections: Stripe, Instagram, Gmail, Slack
Workspace: $0, unlimited seasonal staff
Billing unit: ~$2 per human-hour delivered

The staffing curve nobody can get right

Retail workload is not a flat line and it never has been. A drop, a seasonal campaign, a marketplace event and the six weeks before Christmas each produce two or three times the normal volume of copy, imagery coordination, customer messages and reporting, and then it stops. Everyone in the category runs the same two bad options: hire for the peak and carry the cost through the flat months, or hire for the flat months and burn the team out twice a year.

Agencies and seasonal contractors exist because of this, and they carry their own problems: a ramp-up cost every time, a minimum retainer that outlives the need, and a per-seat charge on four tools for someone who is here for nine weeks.

How the cost line behaves across a trading year

Same workspace, same roster, different amount of assigned work.

Month type	What the work looks like	What the bill does
Flat trading month	Ordinary content cadence, normal support volume, routine reporting	Software is free. Billing only reflects work actually delivered
Launch or drop	Product copy, campaign assets coordination, launch comms, a spike in questions	Rises with assigned work, itemised per job on the work log
Peak season	Support volume multiplies, daily social, daily performance reporting	Rises further, still with no seat charge for temporary staff
The month after peak	Post-mortem reporting, returns handling, planning next year	Falls immediately, because nothing is billed for capacity you are not using

The workers an ecommerce brand hires first

The four roles that carry most of the seasonal load.

Content writer
Product descriptions at volume, campaign copy, email and landing page drafts, all briefed through a skill file carrying the brand voice rather than a fresh brief per drop.
Support specialist
The where-is-my-order tier that triples in December. Triage and drafted responses, with a person closing every task before anything is treated as resolved.
Social media manager
The daily cadence a small brand promises itself and abandons by week three, with Instagram in the connection catalog.
Competitive analyst
Pricing and promotion monitoring across the category during the weeks when a competitor's discount actually changes your day.

Next, for an ecommerce brand

The connections you would set up first and the roles that carry the seasonal load.

Connect Stripe to Polaris

This is the one connection where the key you choose matters more than anything on this page.

Connect Instagram to Polaris

Engagement data is the only honest input to a content calendar, and it is the input most calendars are written without.

Hire an AI support specialist

Hand it the backlog on Friday and read eighteen drafted replies, sorted by severity, before you send a single one.

Hire an AI social media manager

A month of posts planned, written and filed by Tuesday, so the only decision left is which ones you actually publish.

Ticket triage that hands you a sorted queue and drafted replies

Reading forty messages to find the six that matter is the most expensive hour in a support team's day.

A week of social posts drafted before you open the app

Drafting is the part that eats the week. Approving is the part that needs you.

Questions people ask

+Can a worker answer customer emails directly?

It can triage and draft, and Gmail is in the connection catalog, but the completion signal stays with a person. The machine never marks a task done. For customer-facing messages during peak that is the correct arrangement anyway, because the cost of a wrong automated reply to an anxious customer in December is much higher than the minute it takes to approve one.

+Does it connect to Shopify?

Not today. The connection catalog covers Slack, Notion, Linear, GitHub, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Figma, HubSpot, Stripe, Supabase, WhatsApp, Instagram and open web research. Stripe is there, so payments data has a path, but if your operational truth lives in a store platform, expect to bring context to a worker manually for now.

+We already pay an agency for content. Why change?

You may not need to. The realistic comparison is a retainer with a monthly minimum against a metered line that goes to zero in a flat month. If your agency relationship is mostly creative direction, keep it. If a large part of it is volume production of product and campaign copy, that is the part worth testing on one collection.

+How many people can we put in the workspace during peak?

As many as you like. There is no seat count and no tier, so seasonal staff, warehouse coordinators and temporary support agents cost nothing to add and nothing to remove afterwards. This is the specific place per-seat pricing punishes a seasonal business twice, once when you add people and again when you forget to remove them.

+What does peak actually cost, roughly?

It depends entirely on how many hours of work you assign, because there is no fixed component at all. Billing is roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour delivered, estimated from observable effort by an open formula and itemised per job, so the number moves with the work rather than with the calendar or the headcount.