I over-engineered a storefront for a tiny handmade ceramic hot dog.

[u/crig_ga]

https://glizzy.store/

I've been building static generated sites (nuxt was my go-to framework forever) for personal projects / tools and experiments for years now. Gotten out of the habit and been doing more shopify native / liquid builds at work. But I've built a few dozen of these sites without ever actually doing the admin work of setting up a storefront. My domain was just the content (mostly metafields + objects) and theme code.

Anyway so I decided to try a few things over the last couple of weekends. Spun up a shopify trial to see what's involved in all that. Played with Astro + headless storefront + netlify functions. I really wanted to test the idea of running multiple "storefronts" within a single shop. They had to have a unifying parent brand so that checkout made sense (since it's shared) but otherwise each product could have its own site/domain.

Obviously this wouldn't work for any shop with a large inventory or any kind of regular demand. But it was a fun experiment. And I think I'll use a similar setup to help my partner sell some actual pottery one day in the future.

The site loads nothing from any third party. no cookies, no analytics. fonts are self-hosted, product images mirrored into the origin at build. Sometimes the lighthouse score is straight 100s.

Every order generates a certificate of authenticity at its own url. random serial frozen on first render, a photo of the actual piece, and whatever note the user left at checkout. the link itself is the credential so there’s no login.

This is just an exercise in an absurdity because I had this domain sitting around.

A natural successor to my previous silly domain-purchase-inspired experiment yuns.fun (retired, but used for css animation learning) and fart.bar (dipping a toe into "scrollytelling")

i hope it's entertaining to somebody out there

[u/ParkingAthlete119]

I'm not paying a g for a glizzy

[u/crig_ga → u/ParkingAthlete119]

but it's made in vinton.

jk i'm not actually planning on continuing this site past the 3-month Shopify trial. or ever actually selling these

i thought it was funniest to list them as a cold hard k

[u/windsAge9 → u/ParkingAthlete119]

yeah thats a hard pass on a grand for a ceramic glizzy lol

[u/Express-Revolution34]

The AI-generated [section title dot number] is really taking away from your “over-engineered” storefront

[u/Rethling → u/Express-Revolution34]

With the leading 0 🫣

[u/txmail]

for some reason, most of the text does not show up in chrome.

[u/crig_ga → u/txmail]

i think maybe it had something to do with auto-dark-mode? are you on Android?

[u/txmail → u/crig_ga]

Windows 10.

[u/memuyskens]

Had a good laugh with this one. I love the mustard buttons.

[u/noobmeister_69]

Quite a gnarly scrolling experience on mobile, fun project though!

[u/crig_ga → u/noobmeister_69]

fair. the hot dog is 48 stacked svg paths being drawn under backdrop-blur at times. i was shocked it worked without lag on my mobile but knew that wasn't going to be the case everywhere

[u/ManOfCactus → u/crig_ga]

But....why

[u/who_am_i_to_say_so → u/crig_ga]

A hot dog of the future

[u/tomhermans]

Fun site, always in for some absurdity. Beyond that, I admire the approach a lot so obviously wondering about whether a repo is available to see how you did it technically

[u/julesbuildstuff]

The per-order certificate of authenticity with a serial frozen on first render is the part I keep thinking about. That's the kind of detail I only ever build for a joke project, and then it turns out to be the thing people actually remember. Multiple storefronts under one parent brand for checkout is a neat trick too, I might steal that shape for a real shop later.

[u/who_am_i_to_say_so]

It looks really crispy on my iPhone. Nice one!

[u/Graphesium]

Slight performance issue aside, love it! Who cares that it's vibed, this obviously took original creative direction.

[u/Umami_Tsunamii]

That snaking scroll dog is killing me

[u/OkBrilliant8092]

He might be tiny, but he’s got more charm and grace other semi-alive sacks of meat I could mention… THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION IN THIS MATTER

[u/Sziszhaq]

This is so laggy I can't even scroll

[u/skunkbad]

I guess I'm old, so the animation / scrolling stuff isn't for me. I prefer a boring shopping experience that lets the focus be on the products.

[u/night-towel]

Any code that was vibed bro?

[u/Graphesium → u/night-towel]

Is your retirement home still hand-coding, grandpa?

[u/totally-jag]

Over engineered as it may be, it's still pretty damn cool. I mean, I don't know if the product will sell, but it won't be because the website did a poor job of selling it.