Why I Built This

Over the years of building and maintaining WordPress-based e-commerce and business sites for clients, I kept running into the same set of problems. Several pain points coexist across their projects, and after seeing them enough times, I decided to build something better.

Pain Points of Running an Online Store with an Open-Source CMS

Below are the common problems shop owners face when choosing WordPress as their starting point.

Performance

As clients’ sites grow, they tend to install more and more plugins to add new functionality. The problem is, the more plugins they install, the slower the website becomes. I have helped various clients tackle performance issues over the years. The most common cause was plugins conflicting with each other, which led to a noticeable decline in loading speed. Some clients even installed multiple plugins for the same purpose: caching, SMTP, site backup, page builders, and so on.

On top of that, popular plugins that provide e-commerce and multilingual functionality, such as WooCommerce and WPML, can drag down your site’s loading speed significantly, especially on the admin dashboard and backend.

Choosing a Web Host

Most clients opt for shared hosting plans from providers like Hostinger, A2 Hosting, or Bluehost as their first choice, and that makes sense. Shared hosting costs much less than a VPS. However, shared hosting plans often use a feature called application pool recycling. When no one visits your website for a while, the server puts your site’s processes to sleep to save memory and resources for other users. The result: the next visitor experiences a noticeably slow first load.

Maintenance Cost

WordPress updates frequently, and so do its plugins. More updates mean more chances of something breaking. If too many plugins are installed, a WordPress 500 Internal Server Error becomes a familiar sight. Clients without a technical background may not know how to handle it, and smaller companies often do not have an IT department. When something breaks, they hire a freelancer to fix it. In most cases, freelancers will address whatever is visible on the surface, fixing what the client asked for through a workaround, without necessarily tackling the deeper underlying issue. This is understandable given budget and time constraints, but the root problem often remains.

Subscription Cost

The root cause of many of these problems is that WordPress was originally designed for bloggers. Its flexibility and open-source nature have expanded its possibilities enormously, but that also means we end up stacking plugins on top of plugins, like building with Lego bricks. Useful themes and plugins will give you what you need, as long as you keep subscribing to them. But the service providers take no responsibility for your site’s overall performance or how their plugin interacts with others. If you run into conflicts or performance issues, you are on your own.

Subscribing to plugins like WPML, Elementor, Yoast SEO, WooCommerce add-ons, and others can add up to a significant ongoing cost.

To be fair, WordPress is great for someone who wants to build a website quickly without a technical background. The learning curve is relatively shallow. The trade-off is that you end up paying subscription fees to multiple companies for plugins that were never designed to work together, which can lead to exactly the conflicts and performance issues described above.

Time to Build My Own E-Commerce Site

Given everything I have learned from these pain points, I decided to build my own online store with all the custom features I actually need. AI is evolving at a fast pace, and I have watched Claude grow remarkably since 2025. The game has changed. Everyone can now bring their ideas to life with AI faster than ever before.

The platform comes with the following built-in features:

Built-In Features

• Authentication: Google OAuth 2.0 with 2FA
• Multi-Language Support: i18n
• Multi-Currency: dynamic currency switching
• HK Post API: dynamic shipping fee calculation and label generation
• Blog: written in Markdown

Screenshots

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Tech Stack

Deployment

All of the above providers offer free tiers, which means any start-up can host their website at a very low cost — they will still need to budget for a domain and business registration.