LUXWATCH

The shop sold watches through Instagram DMs. Every enquiry was a manual conversation, what's in stock, what's the price, where do you deliver, is it still available. There was no catalogue a customer could browse at 2am, no way to track an order after it shipped, and nothing for Google to index, so every customer had to already know the shop existed.Cash on delivery made that harder rather than easier. Nothing is verified at checkout, so a wrong phone number or an unanswered call meant a courier trip paid for twice and a sale usually lost.

LuxWatch isn't a client engagement. It's a business we have a stake in and operate ourselves, which means every decision on this page is one we still live with, and every trade-off has had to survive contact with real orders.Roughly six weeks from first migration to launch, and shipping to it since. The brief was never "build a shop": it was to replace a set of manual conversations with a system the team could run without us.

• A storefront in English and Arabic, and behind it an admin the team runs day to day without a developer, products, stock, orders, couriers, discounts, content, campaigns, loyalty and support.
• Cash on delivery end to end, because that is how Egypt buys. Card and wallet payments are built and sit dormant behind a feature flag; switching them on is configuration, not development.

We measured a product page at 1,070ms of server render time before the caching, connection-pool and region work, but the honest comparison needs an after figure from real devices, and real-user measurement was only switched on recently. Rather than publish a number measured on a fast laptop and present it as a customer's experience, we'll add this section once there is field data. Nothing here is a guess.