AI Business Plays

All plays › Shops and e-commerce

86’d · What not to do
Shops and e-commerceGrok Bot

86 this: a safety check that warns but still passes

Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, host of The Practical AI Show · Published

What happened

self-reported

A late-package check passed while an order sat 27 hours with no proof it had shipped, because four orders were saved without a sale time. The bot’s nightly review caught it, and the rerun failed and named the late order.

Ryan Hanley runs a sports card business on the side with Grok Bot. One bot’s whole job is to flag late packages. But four orders had been saved without the time they sold, and a fix from the night before, meant to stop the check from crashing, turned that missing time into a warning. So the check warned and still passed, while an order sat 27 hours with no proof of shipping. His bot Carl caught it in a nightly review and changed the rule: if the sale time is missing, use the time the shipping label was printed. If there’s no time at all, the check fails. The rerun failed and named the late order.

Who did it

Ryan Hanley (@rhanley)Sports card business (side business)Ryan Hanley on X · Oct 25, 2026

Try it now

The safe way to do this instead:

  1. List the checks your bots run for you (late orders, unpaid invoices, missed follow-ups).
  2. For each one, ask: what happens when a piece of data is missing?
  3. Make missing data fail the check, not just warn, unless there’s a safe backup (like the label print time).
  4. Have a bot review the day’s checks every night and look for passes that shouldn’t have passed.
  5. After any fix, rerun the check on a known bad case and make sure it fails.
Copy-paste prompt
Review this automated check: [describe it or paste the rules]. List every way it could pass when it should fail, especially when data is missing or blank. For each, tell me the safer rule (use a backup field, or fail loudly). Then give me one test case that should fail, so I can confirm the fix works.

Make it run every week

A play works once. Turn it into a routine in three small steps:

  1. Run it once and check the result yourself.
  2. Give your AI a schedule. Tell it when to run this play (every week, or every month) and to message you with what it found before you act.
  3. Keep a log. One line per run: what was checked, anything flagged, what you did.

See how owners turn plays into systems →

What to watch out for

Self-reported. The lesson: a crash fix that turns errors into warnings can hide the exact problem the check exists to catch. Warnings get ignored; failures get fixed.

Did it work?

PageMotor keeps this site free.

Related plays

  • Shops and e-commerceGrok Bot

    Let a Grok Bot write, price and list your art for sale

    self-reported

    A studio assistant bot wrote the story behind 50+ original paintings, drawings and art cards, priced them, worked out shipping and built eBay drafts, work she says would have taken her weeks, while she kept painting.

    Sharmaine Rayner is an artist and the founder of Born Mystics. Listing art online is slow: every piece needs its story, a price and shipping before it can go up. She handed all of it to her studio assistant Grok Bot. While she worked on a painting, it wrote the story behind each of her 50+ original paintings, drawings and art cards, priced them, worked out shipping and built her eBay drafts. She says it did what would have taken her weeks.

    By Sharmaine Rayner (@RaynerSharmaine), Artist (founder of Born Mystics) · Source

  • Shops and e-commerceGrok Bot

    Train a Grok Bot once on your weekly busywork and cut it to 10 minutes

    self-reported

    Two hours of weekly busywork became one hour of training the first week and about 10 minutes the next, on a $30/month X subscription.

    JoshFL runs a small, licensed firearms business on his own. Instead of spending two hours on busywork, he spent an hour showing his Grok Bot how to do it. The next week the same job took him about 10 minutes. He says the bot learns the task the first time and keeps doing it until it’s done, and his $30/month plan has had plenty of room for the training.

    By JoshFL (@JoshFL321), Sole proprietor, licensed FFL small business · Source

  • Shops and e-commerceChatGPT

    Give ChatGPT your reselling to-do list to finish overnight

    self-reported

    About 8 hours of reselling work spread over several days now gets done by ChatGPT overnight while she sleeps.

    Mindi is a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom building a $10K+/month resale business. She used to stay up late to chip away at her reselling to-do list. Now she hands the list to ChatGPT before bed. Work she estimates would have taken about 8 hours over several days gets done overnight, and she spends her daytime hours on the parts of the business that need her.

    By Mindi (@hey_mindi), Resale business (book pallets and flips) · Source