Custom e-commerce with fulfillment and payments

An e-commerce brand was at proof-of-market: validating demand before committing to a larger platform. The plan was a phased launch on a stack the team controls, with Shopify or additional channels held for later.

The team needed payments, fulfillment, labeling, and lifecycle email working together from day one, but off-the-shelf commerce did not match those requirements. That left the operators wiring storefront, orders, and shipping by hand instead of running the launch.

The breakdown was in fulfillment and process: order capture, inventory, shipping labels, and email automation did not connect on a platform they could shape. Without that, a phased launch could not run cleanly or scale into more channels.

The read was that proving the market mattered more than picking a platform early. The right move was e-commerce on a stack the team controls, so they could validate demand first and expand to Shopify or additional channels once the model was proven.

We built a storefront, inventory admin, order fulfillment, shipping labels, Klaviyo automation, and error logging on a stack the team controls. The build ran on Next.js, Cloudflare Pages, D1, and Tailwind, with Stripe for payments, EasyPost and the UPS API for shipping, and Klaviyo for lifecycle email.

Handoff included the storefront, inventory admin, and fulfillment workflows running together, with error logging in place so the team could spot issues and run the system day to day.

The result is proof-of-market e-commerce with payments, fulfillment, and email automation running together, giving the team a controlled foundation before expanding to Shopify or additional channels.

This was a phase-one build by design. With the foundation in place, the next step is expanding to Shopify or additional channels once the market is proven.