Shelf
A webshop for a bookshop or single-category retailer
Built for: Independent retailers with a real catalogue and no shop online
Built for the case where the catalogue is the hard part: hundreds of titles, metadata that arrives as a CSV from a wholesaler, stock that lives in a till system, and customers who mostly want to know whether it's on the shelf right now.
The S tier deliberately stops short of checkout. For a lot of independents, a browsable catalogue with click-and-collect enquiries is the whole win, and it costs half as much as a shop. Move up when the orders justify it.
Catalogue and enquiries
Up to 200 titles, browsable and searchable. Click-and-collect enquiry form, no checkout.
- Estimated hours
- 50 h
- Rate
- €50/h
- Delivered in
- 6 weeks
- Starting
- September 2026
- Catalogue and product pages generated from your CSV or ISBN list
- Search and filter that works on a phone
- Click-and-collect enquiry form to your inbox
- Design pass in your own brand
- Static build: fast, cheap to host, nothing to patch
Full webshop
As S, plus real checkout on Shopify, shipping and pickup options.
- Estimated hours
- 80 h
- Rate
- €50/h
- Delivered in
- 8 weeks
- Starting
- September 2026
- Everything in S, unlimited catalogue size
- Checkout on Shopify — they handle cards, EU VAT and stock
- Shipping and in-store pickup options
- Order and dispatch emails
- Storefront stays yours; only the checkout is theirs
Wired to the shop floor
As M, plus till/POS stock sync, metadata enrichment and collection slots.
- Estimated hours
- 120 h
- Rate
- €50/h
- Delivered in
- 11 weeks
- Starting
- September 2026
- Everything in M
- Stock synced from your POS, so online matches the shelf
- ISBN metadata enrichment: covers, blurbs, authors, editions
- Collection-slot booking, so pickups don't all land at once
- Staff-facing view of what's been ordered and what to pull
- Shopify subscription and payment fees
- Product photography, cover scans and written copy
- Brand identity from scratch
- Warehouse, courier or fulfilment operations
- Your catalogue as a CSV, or the wholesaler feed you already receive
- API access to the till system for the L tier
- One person who can decide on design and copy
Things I've already shipped that this leans on.
No public retail build yet, and I'd rather say that than dress up an adjacent project. This is exactly what the Spec Sprint is for: judge the plan and the hour estimates before committing to the build.
karakuri からくり
Web appEditor-heavy web app: a lot of interactive state that has to stay coherent, which is what catalogue filtering really is.
See it in the work →kakeibo 家計簿
Web appData-heavy local-first app with import/export — the same catalogue-ingest problem in a different domain.
See it in the work →Not sure this is the right one?
Then don't order it yet. A €300 Spec Sprint gets you a written, fixed-scope plan with the hours in it, and the whole €300 comes off whichever package we land on. That's the honest order to do this in.
40% deposit, 40% at the agreed midpoint, 20% on handover. All prices ex. VAT. Dutch customers pay 21%; EU businesses with a valid VAT number are invoiced at 0% under the reverse-charge rule.