The Soul Foods, cooking oil store.

The storefront is its own Next.js App Router app on Vercel, reading products, collections and articles through Shopify's Storefront API. Nothing about the layout is decided by a theme, and the brand's product photography gets to run full width.

Shopify keeps the parts worth not rebuilding: inventory, orders, payments, taxes, discount codes and the hosted checkout. The compare-at pricing behind every bottle — coconut oil at ₹665 down from ₹850, sesame at ₹475 from ₹600, safflower at ₹465 from ₹800 — is Shopify's own pricing, read through the API, so a sale is a price change in the admin rather than a deploy.

The collection page carries a filter drawer, a sort control and a grid-density switch. The range fits on one screen, so the useful action is not paging through results but comparing them side by side: the density switch lets someone go wide to read labels or tighten the grid to see all seven at once.

Product pages lead with the bottle, then give the size switch for 1L and 5L, the discount against the compare-at price, and the smoke point. The smoke point is the fact that decides whether an oil survives what you are about to cook, so it sits on the page rather than three paragraphs into a description.

Each product carries short, plain-language tags — Nutrient-Dense, Cold-Pressed, Gut-Friendly — instead of a nutrition table. The tradeoff is accepted deliberately: a tag is less precise than a panel, but it is read, and the detail still lives in the accordions underneath.

Reviews run on Judge.me, with the rating shown on the product page and on the cards in the grid, and a write-a-review form that accepts photos. Review images upload to Supabase storage rather than being posted straight to a third party, so a failed submission is recoverable.

Customer accounts run on Supabase with email OTP: no password to set, lose or reset, which suits a store people buy from every few months. The account area covers profile, order history and saved addresses, with orders read back from Shopify so the admin stays the single source of truth.

Merchandising the brand changes often is read from Shopify rather than written in code — the ₹999 free-shipping announcement bar, the home page's featured collections, the newsletter sign-up and the trust strip. The founders edit those in the Shopify admin they already use; the cost is one more place to look when something on the page is wrong.

Writes go through Shopify's Admin API behind the app's own API routes, never from the browser, and Shopify webhooks all land on one HMAC-verified endpoint that busts the matching Next.js cache tag. One URL and one secret to configure means a price edit in the admin reaches the live page without waiting out a cache.

A scheduled reconcile job re-checks what a dropped webhook would have missed, and an admin page lists failed events so a sync problem is visible instead of silent. Upstash Redis rate-limits the public API routes, because contact, newsletter and review endpoints are the ones that get hammered.

The contact page is a real form rather than a mailto link: name, email, an enquiry category and up to five image attachments, which matters for a food product where the complaint is usually a photo of a bottle. It sits beside a WhatsApp link, the brand's phone number and its Telangana plant address, and the submission is stored through Shopify metaobjects so nothing depends on an inbox.

The blog is Shopify-backed, with a load-more endpoint instead of numbered pages, and carries the cooking and oil-guide posts the brand uses to bring people in from search. Every page's metadata is generated from the Shopify data, so a new product or article is indexable the day it is published.