Loots
A personal management tool designed for Kiwis — helping New Zealanders organise their daily lives, track goals, and stay on top of what matters.
The Challenge
The client needed a bespoke online store that could handle high-SKU inventory, flash sales, and a smooth mobile checkout — without the bloat and licensing costs of off-the-shelf platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce.
A Custom Store That Performs
Off-the-shelf e-commerce platforms trade flexibility for speed-to-market. For Loots, the client had strong opinions about UX — they wanted a product experience that felt premium, not templated.
Product Discovery
The product catalogue is backed by a PostgreSQL full-text search index with category and tag filtering. The frontend uses SWR for optimistic updates, so filtering feels instant even on slower connections.
Product detail pages are statically generated with generateStaticParams, giving near-zero TTFB for the most visited pages while dynamic inventory data hydrates client-side.
Checkout Flow
The checkout is a three-step flow — cart review, shipping address, payment — built entirely on Stripe Elements. We implemented 3DS2 handling, address autocomplete via the Google Places API, and a coupon engine tied to Stripe Promotion Codes.
Order confirmation emails are sent via Resend immediately on webhook receipt, with a fallback retry queue for reliability.
Inventory Management
The admin dashboard lets the team bulk-upload products via CSV, manage stock levels per variant, and schedule promotions with start/end dates. Stock webhooks update the storefront in real time so sold-out states are always accurate.
Our Solution
We designed and built Loots from scratch using Next.js and Stripe. A headless commerce architecture gave the team full control over product presentation, pricing logic, and the checkout UX — while keeping backend complexity low through Postgres and a clean REST API.
Tech Stack
Results
- Cart abandonment rate reduced by 28% vs. the previous Shopify store
- Sub-1.5s page load time across product listing and detail pages
- Stripe integration processing payments in 12 currencies
- Full inventory and order management dashboard delivered on day one