Who builds this
An engineering company that ended up in the metals business.
Boston Systems Consulting builds Ophir. We are in Boston, we write the storefront and the console and the services under them, and we operate the whole thing ourselves.
How we got here
From precision engineering to a trading desk.
The company was founded to apply rigorous systems engineering to hard business problems. Those roots were in technical engineering, where precision, reliability and quality are not adjectives -- they are the difference between a part that fits and one that does not.
Commerce moved online and we followed it, but the discipline did not change. What we found in precious metals was a trade where the software on offer had been written for a different business entirely: platforms that assume a fixed price and a fat markup, sold to dealers who have neither. A bullion dealer prices off a market that moves all day and earns a few percent for doing it.
So Ophir is built around the premium rather than the ticket. Prices follow the market, the catalog arrives already photographed and described, and our fee is a share of what the dealer actually makes. The engineering underneath it -- live pricing, bank and card rails, identity checks, per-state tax, audit trails -- is there because a dealer cannot sell without it, not because it makes a good feature list.
What we hold to
Four things we will not trade away.
Built as though the money is real
Because it is. Prices are recomputed from the market rather than cached, fees are charged in whole cents through one authority, and a payment either completes or fails -- there is no third state where a buyer is charged and an order is not.
Tools, not a transfer of liability
We give a dealer good instruments for identity checks, screening, risk signals and records, and we put the evidence where they can see it. What we do not do is take on their legal obligations. Those stay where they are.
One codebase, every store
Each store has its own domain, branding, catalog, pricing and customers, and they all run on the same deployment. A fix or a feature reaches every dealer at once, rather than waiting for a per-client upgrade nobody schedules.
Nothing hidden in the bill
No setup fee and no monthly fee. Our cut is a share of the premium on each order, and we say on the pricing page what is not in that number -- the payment processor bills the dealer directly, and we do not mark it up.
Who does the work
A small team across three disciplines.
The people who build it are the people who run it. There is no tier between a dealer and the engineers.