POP Local

POP Local sells the work of hundreds of small Australian makers, in store and online. The old website was built with Next.js on top of Square, the shop's till and product system. It loaded every product and every category on every category page, so the pages people shop from took up to twenty seconds. Online sales were close to nothing.

Behind the counter it was worse. Every fortnight, someone built a sales report for each maker by hand and typed up a bank file to pay them. Makers dropped products at the shop with a name and a price, and the team wrote the descriptions without knowing what was in them.

The shop moved from Square to Shopify in one go: products, customers and the till in store. In-store and online sales now sit in one system, and every sale records which maker made the product. The old catalogue had about 6,000 product addresses. Each one redirects to the product's new page, so nothing that ranked in search was lost.

POP Maker is a web app for both makers and staff. Makers apply and sign the agreement, then log in to see their own sales, pulled live from Shopify, and their payout history. They submit new products with the details the shop never had: ingredients, materials, care, allergens and the story. They keep their own bank and GST details up to date.

When staff approve an application, the maker is set up in Shopify with their own collection on the website. Staff review product submissions with a description improved by AI, which they can edit, and send the products to Shopify as drafts. Every fortnight, the payout run collects each maker's sales and works out their payout from the cost of goods, adding GST where the maker is registered. Staff adjust and confirm the figures, every maker is emailed their report, and the system creates the ABA files the bank accepts as one batch payment. What took a day of spreadsheets is now one click, with the numbers logged.