A Direct-to-Consumer Storefront Built to Take a Real Order
A concept storefront for a small direct-to-consumer catalogue, where the design decisions are load-bearing for tax and shipping, not just the visuals.
The brief / approach
We set ourselves the brief of designing a small direct-to-consumer store — a 25-to-40-product catalogue, one country of primary sale with a handful of EU shipping destinations — and treated "does checkout actually work" as a design problem, not a developer afterthought bolted on at the end.
The constraint we imposed was that every product template had to hold the fields a real tax and shipping configuration needs (weight, origin, tax class) from the first wireframe, rather than retrofitting them once the visual design was signed off. That changed the order design work happened in: shipping and tax rules got scoped before the product page's hero image did.
The approach here was to design the cart and checkout steps with the same care as the homepage — visible shipping costs before the final step, not revealed at the last screen, and a tax line that's correct for the customer's country by default. A storefront that looks finished but breaks at checkout isn't finished; this concept treats checkout as the actual product.
Constraint & decisions
The constraint: a product template has to carry tax and shipping data from wireframe one, not as a launch-week fix.
- Shipping cost shown at the cart step, not revealed for the first time at payment.
- Tax class assigned per product category during template design, not patched in after launch.
- A checkout with three steps, not five — every extra step is a chance to abandon a small-catalogue cart.
