The Rocking Horse Shop

Our Solution

A single bespoke platform, custom-built from the ground up: React and TypeScript on the front end, a Postgres cloud backend with row-level security throughout, and 18 serverless functions handling payments, email, imports, currency and AI.

Worldwide e-commerce built around real products: 430 products across a hierarchical category tree (81 categories, unlimited nesting), each with galleries, videos, measurement diagrams, custom fields and reviews. A live product configurator lets customers build their horse — size, timber, finish, mane and fittings — with the price recalculating in real time from 1,617 variation price rules. Every option carries a weight modifier that flows through to the shipping calculation, so a configured basket is quoted on its true shipped weight.

The storefront runs a Shopify-style side-drawer basket with local persistence, guest checkout and saved addresses. Stripe and Klarna payments sit behind a hard-guarded live/test mode separation, and a multi-currency storefront refreshes exchange rates automatically across five currencies. Vouchers, wishlists, stock control and low-stock alerts are built into the same admin.

A shipping engine that actually calculates: rather than flat rates, we built a full weight-and-destination matrix — 17 shipping zones, 177 mapped countries, 212 UK postcode overrides and 1,507 rate cells. The basket resolves the destination to a zone, sums the true weight including variation modifiers, and returns the exact rate — worldwide, at checkout, with no manual quoting. Regional overrides handle Highlands, islands and offshore UK postcodes properly.

VAT handled correctly, both ways. Products can be priced inclusive or exclusive of VAT with an admin toggle and auto-calculating ex-VAT fields. The checkout determines the customer's territory and removes VAT for non-UK destinations, with the split stored on the order for clean accounting.

The AI Concierge: a floating assistant, available site-wide, built on the Lovable AI gateway with a curated knowledge base covering the full product range, horse sizing, timber selection, plans and packs, restorations, courses, delivery and FAQs. It streams responses, answers in the brand's voice, and links directly into the relevant page — answering the sizing and timber questions that previously arrived by phone, at any hour, in any timezone.

Courses, restorations and the wider content estate: carving courses with a calendar booking system, live dates, add-ons and accommodation guidance, checked out through the same basket as products. A restoration section with a three-tier structure, before/after sliders and a gallery of ten restored horses. 211 managed content pages, 35 blog posts with category filtering, 14 FAQs, testimonials, announcements and a downloadable catalogue viewer — all CMS-driven.

A CMS the client actually runs: a bespoke admin at a private route with role-based access enforced in the database, not the browser. 23 management modules cover products, categories, orders, customers, courses and dates, shipping zones and matrices, restorations, blog, pages, FAQs, announcements, vouchers, redirects, subscribers, currency rates, payment settings and global store settings. Homepage blocks — including every image and heading — are editable with per-slot dimension guidance and drag-and-drop upload.

Migration and SEO protection: 29,493 historic orders, 925 customer records, the full product catalogue and 1,156 product images were imported through purpose-built migration functions. Legacy customers keep their order history and are linked to new authenticated accounts on first sign-in. 431 URL redirects preserve the site's accumulated ranking, alongside a generated sitemap, structured data, per-page meta control, and machine-readable summaries for AI search engines. Transactional and account email moved to fully branded Postmark delivery from the client's own domain.