Store Health & assistive technology

Karis Life

A Sydney mobility-aids retailer and NDIS provider whose store crashed when it got busy. We rebuilt it as a headless Shopify store: a SvelteKit storefront for customers, with Shopify running products, checkout and accounts behind it, and Sanity for everything the team edits.

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Client: Mobility aids retailer and NDIS provider, Hornsby, Sydney
Industry: Health & assistive technology
Live at: karislife.com.au

Before

A store people rely on kept crashing when it got busy.

Karis Life sells mobility scooters, wheelchairs, walkers and home-care equipment from a showroom in Hornsby and online, to people who often can't simply go elsewhere. Their store ran on WooCommerce, a shop plugin for WordPress. It crashed when it got busy, lost orders, and needed a developer for every fix, and it had been hit by ransomware twice. They asked for a store that stays up, loads fast on a phone, and that the team can change without calling anyone.

What we built · 01

A custom storefront, with Shopify running the shop.

Shopify holds the products, the cart and the checkout, and customers log in with Shopify's own accounts. In front of it sits the storefront we built with SvelteKit. Category and product pages are built from Shopify's live stock as they load, so prices and availability are never out of date. Our own cart hands over to Shopify's checkout in one step. Any visitor can build a favourites list and share it by link, which helps when a carer or an occupational therapist picks equipment for someone else.

Every old product address sends visitors to the right new page.

A Karis Life product page with variants, stock and add to cart

The Karis Life cart before it hands over to Shopify checkout

What we built · 02

Edited by the team, listed for search engines the same day.

Pages, guides, seminars and the NDIS section are kept in Sanity, the editor the team writes in, with a page builder of about thirty building blocks the team arranges and previews before publishing. The newsletter form and the showroom map need no plugin. The sitemap, the page list search engines read, is built from Shopify's live product list, so search engines can find a new product the day it is added.

Karis Life today

Forty years of helping people get around.

Karis Life began as Comfort Discovered in 1984 and later rebranded as Karis Life. It has been an NDIS-registered provider since 2013. From Hornsby it supplies mobility scooters, wheelchairs, walkers and home-care equipment across Sydney, and runs CPD (continuing professional development) seminars for the therapists who prescribe them. As of September 2026, the store still runs on what we built, with ten shop categories and a growing library of guides published by the team.

What changed

The numbers.

+51%

visitors from Google

against the same month on the old WooCommerce store
541ms

to show the main content

GTmetrix grade A, with a perfect performance score

Visitors from Google Analytics, speed from GTmetrix.

Runs on

No lock-in.

Shopify runs the products, orders and checkout in Karis Life's own account. The storefront code, the Sanity editor and the hosting are theirs too, and none of it needs us to keep running.