Home Office Space NZ had the same quiet problem most online retailers run into. A catalogue worth showing off, a real need to stay visible on social media, and no realistic way to post consistently by hand. Daily social content is one of those tasks that everyone agrees matters and nobody has time to do — find a product, write a caption, design something on-brand, post it to every platform, then do it all again tomorrow. Forever.

Our goal was to take that entire job off the to-do list — without hiring for it, and without anyone having to remember to do anything.

The Approach

Rather than reaching for an off-the-shelf social scheduling tool — the kind where you still have to manually create every post — we built a custom automation pipeline that does the whole job itself. It pulls directly from the Shopify store the business already runs, so there’s no separate content library to maintain and nothing to keep in sync. The products are the source of truth; the pipeline simply turns them into daily posts.

Every evening it runs on its own, picks something worth featuring, writes the post, designs the image, and publishes to Facebook and Instagram. No queue to fill, no approvals to chase, no human in the loop on an average day.

What We Built

The engine is Azure Logic Apps handling the orchestration, with a custom Azure Function App doing the image rendering and Claude’s API generating the copy. It connects to Shopify’s Admin API for the product data and Meta’s Graph API to publish to Facebook and Instagram. The whole thing runs on pay-per-execution infrastructure, so a workflow that fires once a day costs only a few dollars a month to operate.

But as always, the technology is secondary to what it actually does for the business.

The Outcomes

**A product gets featured every single day.** The pipeline pulls the full catalogue from Shopify and intelligently narrows it down — only items over $100, only active products with a photo, and nothing that’s been posted in the last fortnight — then picks one at random. The feed stays varied, and every spotlight lands on something worth the attention.

**The captions sound human, not automated.** Instead of a lifeless “Featured today!” template, each chosen product’s real description is sent to Claude’s API, which writes a warm, conversational caption the way a knowledgeable shop owner would — a couple of natural paragraphs, the price woven in, relevant hashtags, different every day. We were strict about the things that matter: no corporate clichés, no hard sell, and never inventing a customer testimonial that doesn’t exist. The copy reads like someone who knows the products wrote it, because the AI is working from the actual product information.

**Every image is unmistakably on-brand.** A custom rendering service composites each product’s photo, title, and price into a branded square graphic — clean product card, logo and wordmark, the price in a bold brand-pink pill, the website in the corner. It handles the awkward cases automatically, so long product names and unusual prices never break the layout. One template, every product, always consistent.

**It posts to Facebook and Instagram on its own.** Once the words and image are ready, the pipeline publishes natively to both platforms — not a link drop, but a proper native post that the algorithms actually favour. No copy-pasting, no logging in, no scheduling app.

**It remembers what it’s done.** After each post, the pipeline records what it featured and when, so the same product won’t resurface for two weeks. It’s a small mechanism, but it’s the difference between a feed that feels curated and one that repeats itself.

**It fails gracefully, not silently.** APIs have off days and tokens expire. We built in automatic retries for transient hiccups, a fallback caption if the AI service is ever unavailable, and a full record of every run — so the rare problem gets caught and flagged rather than quietly costing a week of missed posts.

The Takeaway

This project is a good example of what automation actually looks like when it’s done well. Home Office Space didn’t need to hire a social media manager or buy yet another subscription tool — they needed the content they already had, in Shopify, turned into a consistent daily presence without anyone having to touch it.

The result is a marketing team member that works every day, never forgets, never phones in a lazy caption, and costs a few dollars a month. It’s the kind of leverage that used to be reserved for businesses with a marketing department — and it’s exactly what we mean when we talk about automation making a business more efficient.

Interested in something similar for your business? Get in touch — we’d love to hear what you’re working with and if this could be of any assistance to your business.