Off Shopify, onto a custom storefront with its own inventory + ops system
Results at a glance
Platform
Shopify · template-bound · per-month fees climbing
Custom Next.js storefront, owned end-to-end
Inventory + ops
Shopify's basic counter, no audit trail, no PO flow
Dedicated ops dashboard with race-safe stock, low-stock alerts, supplier + PO workflow, full audit history
Marketing content
Shopify theme editor, code changes for every copy tweak
Headless CMS, owner edits live content himself
The situation
A growing apparel brand, selling both direct-to-consumer and B2B (wholesale), was running on Shopify and had hit the place every Shopify business eventually hits: the platform fits the easy 80% and fights you on the rest. Themes constrain the brand. Inventory logic is a black box. Bundle discounts don't quite work the way the founder wants them to. Adding a new field to the customer flow requires a third-party app, and that app has its own subscription, and now there are four. The monthly bill was creeping; the design and the operations were both stuck inside someone else's product.
The brand wanted to look and run like itself, not like Shopify.
What we built
Two applications, sharing one database, designed to fit each other.
The customer-facing storefront
A fully custom Next.js site (product pages, custom cart, checkout, accounts, order tracking) designed to match the brand instead of fight a theme. Stripe Elements drives checkout (custom UI, not the hosted Stripe page) so the buying flow stays on-brand all the way through.
- Custom discount + bundle engine: DB-backed rules, stackable bundles (3-pack at one price, 6-pack at another, applied greedily to the cart), owner-tunable in the dashboard. No more "Shopify won't let me run this kind of deal."
- Headless CMS for marketing content: Hero copy, manifesto, FAQ, collaboration callouts, footer, navigation, all editable by the owner through a dedicated content interface. Code changes only when the structure changes, not when the copy does.
- Magic-link auth + rate-limited account flows: Customer accounts, order history gated to the signed-in customer (no more open
/orders/lookupprivacy leaks), branded transactional emails through the brand's own domain. - Newsletter system: Signup endpoint with email validation + dedupe, subscriber dashboard with CSV export. No third-party email-app subscription required.
The dedicated ops dashboard
A separate Next.js app the owner uses to actually run the business. This is what Shopify Admin tried to be, but built for this brand's workflow.
- Inventory: Per-size stock, race-safe
decrement_stockwrites on every paid order, full adjustment history with reason codes (sale / correction / return / receive), low-stock view, daily low-stock email cron. - Suppliers + purchase orders: Draft → sent → partial-received → received, atomic via a Postgres function, with stock + audit rows written in the same transaction.
- Orders + refunds: Stripe refund flow with optional restock, voids, partial refunds, all reconciled against Stripe and the brand's books.
- Reports: Margin, sell-through, valuation: actual numbers, not a black-box "trending up" chart.
- Command palette: ⌘K to jump anywhere. Built for someone who actually uses the tool every day.
How it changed the work
The brand owns its software. Adding a new payment method is a 30-minute change, not a third-party app subscription. Running a 6-pack bundle promo for the holidays is a form, not a workaround. The Shopify-shaped wall is gone.
And the ops dashboard means the day-to-day (taking inventory, receiving a PO, refunding an order) happens in a tool built for it. Not in a generic admin trying to be all things to every store.
Engagement details
Type
Multi-phase larger build
Stack
Next.js · Supabase (with race-safe Postgres functions for stock) · Stripe Elements + Stripe Terminal · Sanity for CMS · custom auth on top of Supabase Auth
Two repos, one Supabase project
keeps customer + ops aligned and the database the single source of truth.
Ongoing
Maintenance and small iterations on retainer. Brand owns the code.