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• UNDER CONSTRUCTION •
E-commerce
Emerging Art
A full ecommerce store for a global art marketplace: curated originals from emerging artists, an authenticity guarantee on every piece, and an artist consignment split built into checkout.
-40%
store costs
100%
Open source
99%+
Performance scores
The problem
Emerging artists selling online need proceeds split automatically between artist and gallery on every sale, and the new gallery does not want to use Shopify’s expensive, advanced tiers to access global markets.
What we did
Built on Medusa, an open source commerce engine, with a custom artist and consignment module written into the codebase rather than installed as a plugin. Proceeds split automatically on every sale, to any country desired with a payment of the gallery’s choosing, at no extra costs. Paired with a headless Next.js storefront so design and commerce are decoupled, and ownership over the code and design system are with the store.

Total cost of ownership: this build vs Shopify

Emerging Art runs on a single Hetzner CAX21 instance with our in-house dev retainer covering ongoing patching, deploys, monitoring, and support — modelled here over its first year of trading, against an equivalent Shopify Advanced setup.

What we've achieved

Lighthouse scores: 99+

The best case scores with Shopify stores is generally 65 - 85.

Completely custom design

Every screen designed from a blank canvas for this store. No theme template was used.

Headless storefront

Next.js frontend built with design tokens and Storybook. Every 100ms of latency costs the average Shopify store roughly 7% in sales, directly contributing to revenue.

No added transaction fee

Self-hosted payment integration with only the gateway’s own rate. Shopify charges an extra fee on top of your payment provider unless you use Shopify Payments.

Multi-currency, multi-region commerce

Automatic country detection, with same-day currency calculations. Currency switching comes included rather than sold as an add-on for a store selling to collectors worldwide.

Accessibility is not an afterthought

Accessibility audits and other techniques ensure compliance ensuring that all customers are catered for.

Full data and code ownership

Self-hosted infrastructure and a codebase that belongs to the business. No vendor lock-in, no export limits, and no limits to growth and scaling.

Independence through Open Source

Medusa.js, PostgreSQL, Next.js, and Redis (Valkey) at it's core, support from Coolify, Terraform (OpenTofu) and Docker mean that your your pricing is a simple equation, and your solution is portable.

Natively extensible

New integrations and modules get written directly into the codebase, not added as a third-party app with its own fee and flaky integration.

Foundations
Commerce core
Infrastructure
Testing & accessibility
Applied AI
Scope
  • Custom design + Design system
  • Headless Next.js storefront
  • Admin dashboard
  • CI/CD deploy pipeline
Next.jsMedusaPostgreSQLTypeScriptDockerCoolifyTerraform (OpenTofu)

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