A store that had to be cheap to run
A product business needed an English storefront for overseas buyers. The requirement that shaped everything else was cost: no monthly platform subscription, no per-app fees, and no dependency on a service that could change its pricing or disappear.
What shaped the work
- One data file had to be the source of truth for the catalog — pricing and copy edited in one place.
- Orders had to reach a human immediately, on a channel that already existed: email.
- Everything that previously ranked had to keep working through the move: URL map, redirects, structured data.
- Pages had to be fast on a phone on a slow connection, because most traffic was mobile.
What it runs on
Static generation · PHP for forms and order capture · structured data
What we actually built
- Catalog and product pages generated from a single data file, so a price change is one line, not thirty pages.
- Order capture posts to a server-rendered endpoint and sends a structured notification email — no third-party checkout fee.
- Static output on cheap hosting, with PHP only where a form needs a server.
- Redirect map built from the old site's URL inventory before launch, not after the traffic graph fell over.
- Structured data and Core Web Vitals checked page by page before launch.
The choices that mattered
One data file
Content in one place beats a database when the catalog is small and hand-curated.
Email as the order channel
Fewer moving parts than a webhook chain, and it works on any device.
Static plus a little PHP
Fast and cheap to host, and it does not need a platform to stay alive.
Design for the phone
Desktop-only pages were the original problem: the numbers were there but nobody could read them on a phone.
What we would do next
- Order status page for buyers, generated from the same order records.
- Automated sitemap and schema checks in the release routine.
What is not on this page
No client name, no screenshots of their data and no metrics: those are theirs. What is here is the engineering, which is the part a buyer can evaluate. On a call we will walk through the code.