Online store case study

01 · The brief

What did this project involve?

Replace a hosted-platform store that had been deleted out from under the business, fast, with a store the owner controls: catalogue, card checkout, tax, freight, invoices, an order desk and stock, live on the business's own domain, with no platform subscription.

The old shop ran on a hosted e-commerce platform, and the platform removed the catalogue. The business lost its shopfront overnight. The replacement had to take real card payments within days, handle Australian GST and export sales correctly, quote real freight instead of a guess, and be run day to day by one person from a phone.

It went from first commit to live card payments in three days. The first real order was placed, invoiced and refunded as a test on launch day.

02 · The store

What does the store do?

It sells machined parts and licensed software to customers worldwide. Card checkout; GST-inclusive prices in Australia and GST-free export prices everywhere else; live carrier freight quotes per cart; order confirmations that are compliant tax invoices; a customer order portal; a staff order desk with refunds; and stock control with a ledger.

Tax follows the delivery address, never the visitor's location. An Australian address on an export order is flagged, the owner is emailed the GST owed, and fulfilment is held until it is resolved. Overseas visitors see an indicative figure in their own currency beside the price, and every charge is still taken in AUD, so there is no exchange-rate exposure.

Freight is quoted per cart from the carrier's own calculator using the real mailing box the order will ship in: its outer dimensions and its own weight on top of the contents. The flat-rate table it replaced was wrong in both directions, undercharging by up to $9.65 an order on the heaviest part.

The order confirmation is the tax invoice: seller identity and ABN, per-line description, quantity and price, the GST amount and the words the tax office requires. Exports render as an invoice with GST at zero and the exemption cited. Staff mark orders paid, processing, shipped or cancelled from the desk, refund in full or in part with the card processor charged first and the record written second, and return stock with an explicit action. Customers sign in with their email and order reference and see every order on that email.

No platform subscription sits underneath any of it. The store pays card processing and its own hosting, which the owner controls.

03 · The proof

How do these panels prove it?

The panels below are the store's own figures and labels, rebuilt as vectors: a real live freight quote beside the flat table it replaced, one product priced for four destinations exactly as the store renders it, and the order pipeline with the words a customer actually sees. Generic labels, real data.

A store is mostly tables and forms, so there was no chart geometry to lift the way the other case studies do. The data was lifted instead: the service names, the quoted figures, the price suffixes and the status copy are verbatim, and nothing below is a mock-up.

— Real store data, rebuilt as vectors.

04 · The checks

How does the finished store perform?

It loads quickly, every link goes where it should, and the layout holds on a phone with no sideways scrolling. The whole live store is checked before handover, not just the home page, and every page ships with the browser security settings a store taking card details should have.

A store is heavier than a static marketing page. It carries a database, a payment flow and product photography, so speed here is a trade-off, not a free win. We check it anyway, and that is the point: the same check found a stale cart under-quoting freight and a gap in the product page code, both fixed before launch.

05 · Cost and timeline

What does an online store cost?

An online store starts at $1,490, the same floor as a marketing site, and there is no platform subscription on top of it. Every job gets a fixed quote from the project brief, and we reply within 2 business days.

Essentials $599/ Marketing site from $1,490/ Online store from $1,490/ Web app from $4,900/ White-label talk to us

Hosted platforms charge a monthly subscription for as long as the store exists, on top of card processing. A store you own pays card processing and its own hosting, which you control, and nothing to a platform. The full ladder is on the pricing page, and website cost in Australia sets those figures against what agencies commonly quote.

On timeline: this store went from first commit to taking live card payments in three days.

06 · The takeaway

What does this prove for your store?

A production online store can be owned outright, catalogue to stock ledger, and still be built in days. If you sell physical products, digital licences or both, that is one brief here, not a platform subscription.

The same discipline runs through the rest of the portfolio: the health-tracking case study covers a production app and the site that sells it, and the plan simulation case study covers a B2B product site. For the sectors this store sits in, see websites for motorsport and websites for engineering firms.

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