A Store Online the Same Day, Not in Six Weeks
Independent shop owners were priced out of selling online. A custom build meant a six-week timeline and an agency invoice, and the alternative was renting space on a marketplace that owned the customer relationship.
The Challenge
An independent shop owner who wants to sell online has two bad options. A custom build means a six-week timeline and an agency invoice before a single order arrives, which is hard to justify when you do not yet know whether online will work for you. The alternative is renting space on a marketplace, which is fast but hands over the customer relationship, so you spend years building traffic for someone else. Both options ask the smallest merchants to take the largest risk.
What We Built
We built a multi-tenant platform where the expensive parts are already built and shared. A merchant imports their catalogue and is live on their own subdomain the same day, with payments, delivery and receipts already wired up. Each store gets a generated storefront rather than a themed template rendered on request, so a shop with two thousand products loads like a static site. Antonio worked as fractional CTO across the platform, covering the storefront, the merchant CMS, the mobile apps and the internal admin.
Decisions Worth Explaining
Generated storefronts instead of runtime theming
Rendering a themed store per request makes every merchant pay a performance cost for flexibility most of them never use. Generating the storefront moves that work to publish time, so catalogue size stops being a page speed problem.
Subdomain per merchant, not a shared marketplace URL
This is the difference between the merchant building their own brand and building the platform's. It costs more in routing and certificate handling, and it is the reason a merchant can eventually leave with their customers, which is what makes the offer honest.
The Result
Merchants go from signing up to taking orders on the same day rather than in six weeks, at an entry price of $25 a month. The platform now carries real shops, the largest running over two thousand products.
Under the Hood
Multi-tenant architecture on Firebase with per-merchant subdomains, Stripe payments, an Astro storefront generated per store, plus a merchant CMS, mobile apps and an internal admin. Antonio acted as fractional CTO across the platform.
Technology Stack
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