Ishikaa Jain, couture store.

I built the storefront as a headless Next.js 15 app on Vercel reading the Shopify Storefront API, and left Shopify as the till, the catalogue and the admin. The tradeoff is that I own every page — a theme would have given me a product page for free — but a theme's product page is exactly the part that could not stay standard here.

Add to Cart does not add on the first press. It opens a measurement sheet with eight fields — chest, waist, hip, inseam, shoulder, sleeve length, bottom, armhole — pre-filled from the chosen size, and only finishes the add once she saves. Measurements are the order, so they are collected while she is still looking at the garment rather than chased over email a week later.

Those values travel as cart line attributes named with a measurement. prefix, which the server action filters on and Shopify shows as labelled rows against the order line. It also fixes a real bug: most pieces are a single Shopify variant with the size carried in the attributes, so without them the cart folds two sizes of one kurta into one line of quantity two while the order Shopify records has them as two.

"Visit store (book an appointment)" goes to an in-app route under the product, not to an external calendar. It carries the handle and the chosen size through, so the booking page shows that garment, prices the variant she actually picked rather than the cheapest one, and then mounts a Cal.com inline embed for ishikaajain/personal-appointment. The whole route is noindex — a booking flow tied to one product has no business in search results.

"Customise it" is a wa.me link with the message already written: "Hi, I'd like to customise: <garment name>". The number lives in one exported constant shared by the footer, the mobile menu and this button, because the way a customer ends up messaging a dead number is three copies of it drifting apart. It lands in the Interakt business inbox, not on someone's personal phone.

Every piece of merchandising copy lives in a Shopify metaobject rather than in the code: the announcement bar, the signup offer, the collection launch modal, the Instagram reel row, and contact form submissions. Each one has a setup script that sets access.storefront to PUBLIC_READ and turns on the publishable capability — the first because a metaobject is invisible to the Storefront API without it and fails silently, the second because Active/Draft then doubles as the on/off switch with no custom boolean and no deploy.

The launch modal's copy can contain {collection} and {discount} tokens, resolved at render from the referenced collection and the live Shopify discount. Neither is stored as text, so renaming a collection or dropping a discount from 10% to 5% cannot leave the popup promising something checkout then refuses.

Navigation filters by tag, not by collection. A piece is women's and a kurta set and georgette and party wear all at once, and a collection per combination would be unmanageable, so the mega menu composes queries like tag:"women" AND tag:"kurta-set". Each tag is quoted because Shopify's search syntax reads a bare hyphen as an operator and hyphenated tags are the norm here.

The client had already filled a Google Sheets workbook with one tab per product, labels down column A. Rewriting 24 tabs into my flat CSV template was the other option; meeting their format was the cheaper side to bend, so the importer reads both and dispatches on file extension. It tolerates "Rs 35000", "Rs. 60,000" and "Rs 1,52,000" by stripping every separator instead of interpreting it, because that last one is Indian grouping for 152000 and naive parsing reads it as 1.52. Each product goes in as one productSet call, which upserts on handle, so the corrected sheet the client always sends after the first pass updates the products instead of duplicating them.

Where the workbook was thin, I derived rather than invented. Gender and garment type come out of fixed positions in the SKU (IJ-MTO-W-3PC-001-GL-XS → women, and 3PC broken by the title because five are kurta sets and one is a skirt set), fabric from words in the free text, occasion from the category. All of it is written into a flat review sheet marked as derived, so a wrong guess is a cell the client corrects rather than a bug I have to chase.

The Admin API credentials are a Dev Dashboard app, which is issued a token that expires in 24 hours rather than a long-lived shpat_ one. So the token is exchanged with the client credentials grant, cached with a 60-second margin so a request cannot pick one up mid-expiry, and guarded by a single in-flight promise so a cold instance does not fire one exchange per concurrent caller.

Indexing is gated on purpose. The canonical origin comes from one environment variable that every canonical URL, OG image, JSON-LD @id and the sitemap derive from, so moving the site to its own domain is a dashboard change rather than a release. While the flag is off, robots.txt still allows crawling but publishes no sitemap — a blocked page can never be read, so Google would never see the noindex and could index the bare URL anyway.