An online store you run, on a platform I maintain
For businesses selling something real, especially where subscriptions, wholesale pricing or awkward inventory make the off-the-shelf answer expensive.
What usually goes wrong
The usual route is fine until it is not. A hosted platform costs little at the start, then the thing you need turns out to be an add-on, and so does the next thing, and before long you are renting four apps at thirty or forty dollars a month each to make one shop behave. None of it is yours and any of it can change under you.
The alternative is usually a custom build from an agency, which works on launch day and then slowly rots, because maintenance was never really part of the deal and the person who understood it has moved on.
How I do it
Your store runs on Orchard, a multi-tenant commerce platform I built and operate. That is the actual difference here: I am not reselling someone else's product, so when your shop needs something to change, it can change, rather than becoming a support ticket in a queue behind thirty thousand other merchants.
You get a back office you genuinely run yourself: products, orders, refunds, inventory, and reporting, without needing me for day-to-day work. Subscriptions, wholesale pricing and abandoned-cart recovery are switches rather than purchases. Payments run through your own payment account, so the money moves from your customer to you and never touches me.
The honest tradeoff is that the shopfront itself is built and maintained by a developer, which is me. There is no theme store to browse and no visual page builder for the storefront. In exchange you get something built for your business rather than adapted to it, and someone who is still here after launch.
- A back office you run yourself: products, orders, refunds, inventory, reporting
- Subscriptions, wholesale pricing, and abandoned-cart recovery when you need them
- Your own payment account, so the money is yours end to end
- Hosting, maintenance, and the storefront build, on an ongoing basis
Evidence for this specifically
Human Nature
A real store, running a real business.
Storefront, checkout, subscriptions, wholesale pricing, and the admin the owner works in every day. Not a demo and not a prototype. You can open it right now and buy something.
Orchard
The platform your store would run on, and I own it.
Most people selling you a store are reselling someone else's. This is mine. That means your store is not competing for attention with a vendor's roadmap, and when something needs to change I can change it rather than file a support ticket.
Questions people ask about this
- Is this just Shopify with extra steps?
- No, and Shopify is often the right answer. If you sell straightforward products and the standard flow fits you, use it, it is very good and it is cheaper than me. This is worth considering when the standard flow does not fit: subscriptions that need real logic, wholesale alongside retail, inventory that behaves oddly, or a checkout that has to do something particular.
- What happens to my store if you stop working on it?
- The fair question to ask anyone who is one person, so here is the concrete answer. Your domain, your payment account, your customer list and your product data are yours and are exportable at any time, not held hostage in a format only I can read. If I disappeared tomorrow you would need a developer to take over the storefront, which is a real cost and I am not going to pretend otherwise, but you would not lose the business or have to start again.
- How do payments work?
- You open your own payment account and the store connects to it. Customers pay you directly. I never hold your money, never take a percentage of your sales, and could not touch a payout if I wanted to. It also means your payout schedule and your fees are between you and the payment provider.
- Can I sell subscriptions or to wholesale customers?
- Yes to both, and they are the reason a lot of shops end up here. Recurring orders, subscriber-only pricing, wholesale price lists that only approved accounts see, and minimum order rules are all built in rather than bolted on. Human Nature runs subscriptions and wholesale on this platform today.
Tell me what you are trying to build
A few sentences is enough. If this is not the right fit I will say so and point you somewhere better.