Case Study · Ecommerce
Two stores. Five years. Twelve hours of maintenance.
JW-Pachysandra and Sammy's Pachysandra have been taking orders continuously since 2020 on stores we built and still run. In that time they have needed 12.5 hours of our attention between them, and not one migration.
At a glance
- Clients
- JW-Pachysandra, Sammy's Pachysandra
- Industry
- Horticulture, direct to consumer
- Engagement
- Managed Store
- Live since
- 2020
12.5
hours of maintenance, total, across five years and two stores
The outcome
837
orders taken across the two stores since 2020
12.5
hours of maintenance in total, across 10.7 client-years
0
migrations, re-platforms or rebuilds in five years
The problem
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 colour and size.
That is the shape of business a hosted storefront handles worst. The catalogue 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 simply keep working. Neither business has anyone to manage a website, and a season missed because a platform changed underneath them is a year of revenue that does not come back.
What we built
A store shaped like the business.
Two custom stores on the platform that became Managed Store: catalogue, cart and checkout, customer accounts, order management, shipping labels, and card payments through each business's own merchant account. Built once, for what each of them actually sells.
Model the catalogue
Products organised 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. Five years and 12.5 hours later, still the same store.
The result
The boring outcome, which is the point.
Eight hundred and thirty-seven orders later, 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 12.5 hours is the number that surprises people. It is not an uptime statistic, it is our own time log: across two stores and five years, that is the total of everything we have been asked to do. Roughly an hour and a quarter per store per year.
And because the software was written for them, it is theirs. If they ever wanted to take it somewhere else, there is something to take.
The offering
This is what Managed Store is.
These two stores are the platform in production. Managed Store is that arrangement offered properly: a custom store on software you own, hosted and maintained for a flat monthly fee.
Managed Store
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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