This project taught me coding. What started as the idea to showcase some images of my photo-addicted-friends and myself turned - with growing web development skills - into a full grown online shop. But what's the purpose? Do you have a location that looks boring, but you don't know any artists or buying from them is either difficult or utterly impossible? Then this shop is for you. You get collections of fitting prints for your room in the sizes you like.
Tech Stack:
Next.js
Shopify
Shopify Headless
vercel
motion.dev
TailwindcssFounder & Developer
Personal Project
About
I like photography. And some of my friends as well. So after learning some web development with a portfolio page for our photos (which does not exist anymore) this idea emerged over learning new technologies, replacing tech stacks and moving towards the "state of the art" in web development. After a lot of try and error or hearing about a cool technology in a podcast and trying to adapt it, I decided to handle the photos in a shopify powered backend. This means I have access to managing my store as if I would have a normal shopify shop, but I was not satisfied with shopifies capabilities of tweaking the front-end to my needs. So I coded the frontend myself based on a template called "Next.js Commerce".
Challenges
Honestly? In the first place, understanding the template I used for the front-end. And then integrating shopifies headless channel (their way of providing shopify functionality to customers with an own front-end) into it. I wanted to be able to manage as much as possible in shopifies admin panel (like the app). Not only my products, but also privacy policies, the menu and more. And last but not least, I wanted that the user can select the size of each photo in the collection and could even remove certain images from the collection before ordering. That imposed the biggest challenge.
Results
A beautiful looking shop with no customers and no photographers presenting their images? So far I have not sold one collection of photos. But I have to admit I also have not advertised the shop by writing cafés, AirBnBs or Restaurants. Maybe because I was not able to convice any photographer companion of mine to upload some of his or her images; but also maybe because I am scared what might happen. BUT I will do it! I will tell the world that this shop exists and then we will see what happens. I mean I even have the printing company and DHL shipping set up.
