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Your Pottery Deserves Better Than Etsy's 30% Cut

If you're a Japanese ceramics studio watching Etsy keep $90 on every $300 teapot you ship to Brooklyn, you're funding their brand, not yours.

Custom ecommerce platforms for Japanese ceramics manufacturers. Showcase craftsmanship, tell artisan stories, and ship pottery globally with confidence.

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Direct-to-Collector Ecommerce

A headless Shopify storefront decouples your product presentation layer from the checkout engine, giving ceramics studios full control over how each piece is photographed, described, and discovered. We configure inventory rules that mark a piece sold the moment it is claimed, preventing duplicate sales on hand-thrown work that cannot be reproduced. The result is a store you own outright, with customer data, repeat-buyer relationships, and margins that stay in your studio.

What is holding your current website back?

Common gaps we find in nearly every audit.

Etsy and similar marketplaces charge listing fees, transaction fees, and payment processing fees that compound on every sale, often totaling 25 to 33 percent of revenue per order.
Risk: Studios that rely on marketplace traffic have no customer list, no ability to contact past buyers directly, and no protection if policy changes or algorithm shifts bury their listings overnight.
Standard ecommerce themes treat all products as repeatable SKUs, making it structurally difficult to mark a one-of-a-kind teapot as truly sold and remove it cleanly from all collection pages the moment it sells.
Risk: Overselling a singular piece means hand-throwing a refund conversation with a collector who already planned a gift, which damages the studio's reputation faster than any bad review.
High-resolution glaze photography loses critical detail when compressed through marketplace image pipelines that standardise dimensions and quality across millions of unrelated product categories.
Risk: Collectors buying a 300-dollar teapot based on a muddy thumbnail are more likely to return it, dispute the charge, or simply never return to buy again.

How We Build This Right

Every safeguard, built in from Day 1.

International Payment & Tax Compliance

We configure Shopify Markets and Avalara or TaxJar integrations to calculate and collect the correct VAT, consumption tax, and import duties for each destination country, so you are not personally liable for under-collected tax on cross-border shipments.

Single-Unit Inventory Integrity

Custom inventory reservation logic locks a product the moment a customer reaches checkout, not the moment they click buy, preventing two collectors from completing payment on the same hand-thrown piece simultaneously.

Core Web Vitals & Accessibility Standards

Every storefront we ship meets WCAG 2.1 AA contrast and keyboard navigation requirements and passes Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds, keeping your organic search visibility intact as Google's ranking criteria tighten.

What We Build

Purpose-built features for your industry.

Glaze-Detail Product Pages

Each product template is built around a custom image component that supports zoom, multiple light-condition shots, and a short video loop, giving a collector in Brooklyn a tactile sense of a piece they cannot hold before buying.

One-of-a-Kind Inventory Rules

A configurable sold-state system removes sold pieces from all collection grids and search results instantly, optionally archiving them in a sold gallery that demonstrates studio output and collector demand to new visitors.

Artisan Story Architecture

Structured content fields for kiln type, clay origin, firing temperature, and maker biography are baked into the product schema, so story copy appears cleanly in product pages, collection filters, and structured data that search engines index.

International Shipping Configuration

We integrate your preferred carriers, configure dimensional weight calculations for fragile-goods packaging, and surface estimated delivery windows at checkout by destination zone, reducing support emails about where an order is.

Built on a Modern, Secure Stack

Next.jsShopify HeadlessSanity CMSVercelStripeCloudinaryEMS / DHL API

Our Development Process

From discovery to launch. Quality at every step.

01

Inventory Audit and Migration Plan

1 week

We document every active listing, photograph gap, and shipping zone you currently manage on marketplace platforms and map them to a Shopify data structure that preserves SEO value from any existing external links to your work.

02

Storefront Design and Component Build

2-3 weeks

We design and build the headless frontend in Next.js against your brand identity, prioritising the product page template, collection grid, and checkout flow before any secondary pages, so you can review the critical path early.

03

Payments, Tax, and Shipping Integration

1 week

Shopify Payments or your preferred gateway is configured alongside tax calculation for each target market and carrier rate cards for fragile ceramic shipments, with packaging dimension presets that prevent mis-quoted rates at checkout.

04

Launch, Redirect, and Handoff

1 week

We migrate your domain, redirect any marketplace deep links to equivalent product pages, submit the new sitemap to search consoles, and run a live order test before handing you a recorded walkthrough of the Shopify admin so your team can list new pieces independently.

Social Animal

Ready to discuss your your pottery deserves better than etsy's 30% cut project?

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Frequently Asked Questions

We build the frontend around your existing photography. If you need new shots, we provide art direction specs for your photographer -- lighting angles, background standards, and the exact resolutions our responsive image pipeline requires. We also implement 360° viewers using image sequences rather than 3D models, which simply look better on glazed surfaces.
Yes. We implement real-time inventory sync that marks unique pieces as sold the moment checkout completes. If you sell across multiple channels -- your website, a physical gallery, wholesale -- we connect them through Shopify's inventory API. A piece sold in your Kyoto showroom disappears from the website within seconds.
We integrate directly with EMS, DHL, and FedEx APIs using your negotiated rates, then add configurable surcharges for fragile packaging, oversize boxes, and insurance. Customers see the real landed cost at checkout -- no surprises. You can also set flat rates per region if predictable pricing works better for your business.
Absolutely. We configure Stripe Japan or Komoju to support convenience store payment (konbini), bank transfer (furikomi), and credit cards for domestic orders. International orders run through Stripe's standard card processing with multi-currency support for USD, EUR, GBP, and AUD alongside JPY.
A typical ceramics ecommerce build runs 10-12 weeks from kickoff to launch -- covering design, development, bilingual content setup, shipping configuration, and testing. Simpler stores with fewer products and a single language can launch in 8 weeks. We give you a detailed timeline during your free assessment.
Yes. Sanity CMS gives your team a visual editing interface for adding products, updating artisan stories, creating seasonal collections, and managing blog content. We build custom content models that match how you think about your catalog -- by kiln, by glaze, by collection -- not generic ecommerce categories.
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Need enterprise scale?

200+ employee company? Complex multi-tenant, auction, or multi-location requirement? We have a dedicated enterprise capability track.

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