Two stores. Five years. Twenty-two hours of maintenance.
JW-Pachysandra and Sammy's Pachysandra have been taking orders continuously since 2020 on stores we built and they own outright. Neither business employs anyone technical.
- Clients
- JW-Pachysandra, Sammy's Pachysandra
- Industry
- Horticulture, direct to consumer
- Engagement
- Managed Store
- Live since
- 2020
Selling plants is not selling t-shirts.
Both businesses grow and ship pachysandra, a ground cover sold by the flat rather than the unit, to customers planting an area rather than buying an object. Order sizes are large, shipping is heavy and seasonal, and the questions a buyer asks are about coverage and planting conditions rather than color and size.
That is the shape of business a hosted storefront handles worst. The catalog model expects units in variants, the shipping model expects parcels, and the workarounds accumulate as apps and custom fields until the platform is being fought rather than used.
They also needed the stores to keep working. A season missed because a platform changed underneath them is a year of revenue that does not come back.
A store shaped like the business.
Two custom stores on the platform that became Managed Store, taking card payments through each business's own merchant account.
Model the catalog
Products organized the way the growers think about them, not the way a theme expects.
Build the checkout
Cart, checkout and accounts sized for large, seasonal, heavy orders.
Wire the back office
Order management and shipping labels in the same admin they run the site from.
Then leave it alone
Hosting, patching and backups handled.
The boring outcome.
Both stores are running the software they launched with. No forced upgrade, no theme deprecation, no year where the platform's roadmap became the business's problem. When a season arrives, the store is there.
The 22 hours is not an uptime statistic. It comes from our own billing and time records, and it is the total of everything we have been asked to do: maintenance, support and the occasional new feature, with nothing left out. Roughly two hours per store per year.
If they ever wanted to take the software somewhere else, there is something to take.
What changed
837
orders taken across the two stores since 2020
22
hours of maintenance in total, across 10.7 client-years
0
migrations, re-platforms or rebuilds in five years
This is what Managed Store is.
Managed Store is this arrangement offered properly: a custom store on software you own, hosted and maintained for a flat monthly fee.
Want a store that outlasts the platform?
Tell us what you sell. We will tell you what we would build and whether owning it makes sense at your volume.
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