Artzebo makes shade you would actually want to look at. Stretch tents, gazebos and Kidzebos, digitally printed in bold patterns and built for beaches, backyards and the long afternoons in between. The product is colour – so the shop has to carry it properly.
The brief came with the look already set: desktop layouts from Artzebo’s own designer. Our job was everything that turns a layout into a working shop – the build, the storefront, the checkout, the systems behind it, and the search groundwork to get it found.
Challenge
The existing site ran on WordPress, Divi and WooCommerce, and it was slow. Product pages were heavy enough that a single product video could not load its metadata in fifteen seconds. For a brand whose whole pitch is the image, that is the wrong place to lose people.
The catalogue was also harder than it looks. Gazebos and gazebo covers are one product with a size, then a choice of around twenty patterns. Stretch tents are the opposite – a separate product per pattern. Two different shapes of product, one storefront that has to make both feel simple.
And there was a live defect underneath it all. The old site’s structured data was publishing a different price to the one charged at checkout – the kind of mismatch that gets Google Shopping listings disapproved.
The work
Rebuilt in Astro, end to end – we replaced the whole stack rather than putting a new front end on old plumbing. No WordPress, no WooCommerce. The site ships lean, loads fast on mobile data, and lets the photography do the selling.
Two product models, one clean experience – a step-by-step size-then-pattern configurator for gazebos and covers, and a pattern grid for stretch tents. Each customer sees the path that matches what they are buying.
A pattern library the client owns – patterns live in Sanity Studio as their own entries, with name, swatch and lifestyle imagery. Artzebo adds a new print themselves, and the site stops any pattern without a buyable product from showing as a dead tile.
Checkout that always charges the right amount – payment runs through Yoco’s hosted checkout (card, Apple Pay and Google Pay). Every order is priced on the server from the live catalogue before the customer is sent to pay, so the total charged always matches the site.
An order inbox, not a plugin – orders land in Sanity Studio, sorted into paid-to-fulfil, awaiting payment, needs review, fulfilled and refunded. Customers get a confirmation when they pay and an on its way email when the team marks an order fulfilled – with courier and tracking if they add it.
Mobile-first from desktop designs – the layouts were desktop only, and most South African shoppers are on a phone. We built mobile first from the intent of the desktop design, rather than squeezing the desktop layout down.
Search and AI-search groundwork – Product and Offer structured data that matches the real price, breadcrumbs, FAQ content written for answer engines, and redirects from every old URL so existing rankings carried across.
Content the team can run – pages, imagery, announcement bar and settings all editable in Sanity, with a walkthrough at handover: Studio for products, patterns and orders; Yoco for payments, refunds and payouts.
If your online shop is slower than your product deserves, or held together by plugins nobody wants to update, talk to us about rebuilding it properly.