E-commerce stores for Australian businesses, run by your own team.
We build online stores and marketplaces for Australian businesses, from the storefront to the stock screen. Live examples include a perfume store and a fashion label in Pakistan, and a veterinary marketplace in the USA. Each loads quickly on a phone and takes payment the way its customers prefer, and the two retail stores are run day to day by the brands’ own teams.
- 3: live stores and marketplaces: Sky Fragrances, Rang-e-Aahan and DVM Central
- 97: Sky Fragrances on Google’s mobile performance test
- 45: content blocks the Rang-e-Aahan team edits without us
- 66: automated test files behind the Rang-e-Aahan store
§ 01Overview
A store shaped around how you sell.
We start with what you sell, who buys it and how they prefer to pay, then build the storefront, the checkout and the admin around those answers rather than around a template.
A hosted store platform is a sensible start for plenty of shops. The trouble begins when the business stops fitting the template: trade pricing, several sellers under one roof, a checkout your customers find awkward, or monthly app fees that grow with every feature. That is when a store built for you is worth a look, and if a hosted platform still suits you, we will say so.
For Rang-e-Aahan, a women’s clothing label in Pakistan, we built a server-rendered Next.js storefront on Payload CMS, customer accounts that handle returns and store credit, and 45 content blocks the team uses to put up a new season or a sale by itself. For Sky Fragrances, a perfume brand that also ships abroad, we built a store that scores 97 for mobile performance in Google’s Lighthouse test, with a Scent Finder quiz and an admin that works on a phone.
On the trade side, DVM Central brings thousands of veterinary products from many suppliers into one storefront for practices in the USA. Sellers list products and manage orders in their own portal, and buyers check out through Stripe. Underneath, Laravel powers the back end and Next.js the storefront, deployed with Docker on DigitalOcean.
For an Australian store, your point of contact is our head office in Hobart, and our senior engineers work from Lahore. The Lahore morning lines up with the Australian afternoon, so a staging review or an urgent fix happens inside your working day. The domain, hosting and store accounts are set up in your name from the start.
Where it fits
- Brand stores selling direct to customers
- Trade and wholesale ordering
- Multi-vendor marketplaces
- Stores that have outgrown a hosted platform
- Fast on a phone. Server-rendered pages that load quickly
- A checkout that fits. The payment options your customers use
- An admin you run. Products, orders and content, no developer
- Tested before launch. Test orders on every payment method
§ 02What you get
Six deliverables.
Storefronts
Collections, campaigns, search, filters and product pages rendered on the server, so Google and shared links see real content and pages open quickly on a phone. On a mobile test, the Sky Fragrances homepage shows its main content in 1.4 seconds.
Checkout and payments
Card gateways, bank transfer, cash on delivery and store credit can all run through one internal payment layer, so adding a method later is a contained change rather than a new checkout. We connect the providers that suit your customers, using merchant accounts in your name.
Customer accounts
Past orders, returns, saved addresses, wishlists and store credit, plus order tracking for shoppers who would rather not create an account at all.
An admin your team runs
Products, stock, orders, coupons, banners and page content, managed by your own staff. Rang-e-Aahan’s team launches its own campaigns from the admin, and the Sky Fragrances admin is built to work on a phone screen.
Marketplaces and trade
Several sellers under one storefront, each with a portal for listings and orders, and the search and filtering a large catalogue needs. DVM Central is built this way for veterinary suppliers and the practices that buy from them.
Built to be found
Clean URLs, product metadata, structured data and sitemaps go in during the build. A store lives on search results and on links people send each other, and both need real HTML at every address.
§ 03How it runs
Four steps, in the open.
- Step 01
Scope the store
We go through your range, your customers, how they pay and how orders reach them, then write it up as a plain scope with a fixed quote in AUD.
- Step 02
Build in stages
The storefront, checkout and admin are built in stages on a staging site you can click through, so you see real progress every week rather than at the end.
- Step 03
Test every path
Before launch we place test orders through every payment method and check the admin at phone size. Sky Fragrances passed a 97-item acceptance checklist before handover.
- Step 04
Launch and hand over
Your domain, hosting and payment accounts are in your name. Your team gets a written guide to running the store, and we can stay on month to month for updates, fixes and SEO, with no lock-in.
Stack we use for this
- Next.js
- React
- Vue.js
- Nuxt
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Node.js
- NestJS
- Laravel
- PHP
- Python
- Django
- Payload CMS
- Headless CMS
- Stripe
- REST APIs
- GraphQL
- MySQL
- MariaDB
- PostgreSQL
- MongoDB
- Redis
- Tailwind CSS
- Docker
- DigitalOcean
- AWS
§ 04FAQ