By The Fire — off Shopify, onto its own stack
A handmade candle brand outgrew its Shopify theme. What replaced it is a Next.js storefront and admin with Stripe checkout, shipping rules that change by country, and an account for every buyer who never has to invent a password. Live at bythefire.shop.
A themed storefront makes the ordinary things effortless and the specific things impossible. This shop posts worldwide from Cyprus, so rates change by continent and then again by country; the candles come in sizes and vessels that a generic variant model describes badly; and the owner wanted an admin that talks about candles rather than about a platform’s idea of a catalogue.
Checkout works out the continent-level shipping blocks and then the per-country exceptions before a Stripe session is ever created, so an order nobody can fulfil is never taken in the first place. When the payment lands, the webhook creates a Supabase Auth user and emails a magic link — buyers end up with an order history without ever inventing a password. Product attributes moved out of ad-hoc variant JSON into a real attribute and option model, and images come through a Cloudflare Worker sitting in front of storage.
