A homeware shop rebuilt so AI search can read the catalogue

What we found

The brand had been selling online for two years through a WordPress and WooCommerce shop and getting almost nothing back from it. Nobody could get into the WordPress admin any more, so we read the catalogue out through the public WooCommerce Store API and rebuilt it piece by piece: 24 products, 93 variants, 19 series, 9 categories and 137 images.

The audit turned up problems that had nothing to do with looks. Shipping was quoted as a flat promise the real carrier tariffs did not support. Strike-through prices had no genuine previous price behind them. Some claims about the product and the payment gateway could not be backed up, so they came out.

Then the finding that changed the order of work. On 4 August 2026 we fetched every URL the way GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and OAI-SearchBot see it. All 65 pages returned zero characters of body text. The shop only existed after JavaScript ran, so to an AI assistant the catalogue was empty.

What we built

We rebuilt the store on our own stack rather than another plugin ecosystem: Vite, React and TypeScript with Tailwind and shadcn/ui, TanStack Query for data, Supabase for Postgres, Storage, Auth and Deno edge functions, and Vercel for hosting. Row level security is enabled and forced on all 25 tables, and prices are re-read on the server before anything is charged.

• All 65 routes are pregenerated at build time, each with its own title, description, canonical, Open Graph tags and JSON-LD. Three build guards fail the build if a route drops below 400 characters, so readability cannot quietly regress.
• The migrated images were regenerated as WebP at three widths. The second photo batch alone went from 80.0 MB of PNG to 11.3 MB, 85.9 percent less.
• Shipping is calculated in Postgres by weight and zone, and the same function answers both the browser estimate and the server that creates the order.
• Card payments run through the client's own bank virtual terminal over the CECA protocol, with the amount re-read server-side, the signature verified and repeat notifications made idempotent.
• The brand's own team runs the shop from an admin panel for orders, products, prices, stock, series and shipping.

How it runs now

The catalogue serves 105,212 characters of readable HTML across 65 URLs, and a GitHub Actions cron triggers a Vercel deploy hook every morning so the prerendered pages follow stock and price changes. A product feed with 92 references is regenerated on each build for Google Merchant Center, Meta and Pinterest. A 64 page sitemap is accepted in Search Console, and the old WooCommerce sitemap, which had been returning errors, is gone. Order confirmations leave from the client's own subdomain.

Five multi-agent audit passes ran before launch, every finding verified adversarially, and more than 70 were fixed. Several of them cost real money: a scene selling black pieces while showing blue ones, an order charging 99 units, a cart duplicating quantities, and a VAT error on the preparation fee worth about 80 euros per 100 orders.