Here is a hard truth about selling on someone else's marketplace. Every sale you make is building their business, not yours.
That was where Evvy Hairs, a premium hair brand, was stuck. The marketplaces took a cut of every order and kept the brand invisible to its own customers. There was no customer list to build loyalty on, no inventory tracking, and no way to grow repeat business. Running orders meant juggling messages and spreadsheets. The brand was doing the selling, but the platform owned the relationship.
They wanted out. They wanted their own store, their own customer data, and a way to run everything without depending on a developer for every change. So we built it, two full products, from the ground up.
A storefront that feels premium
The first product is the store at evvyhairs.com. We gave shoppers detailed product pages with everything that matters when you buy hair: type, texture, length, origin, and color, with a full gallery and video support. Products can carry variants, each with its own price and stock, so inventory is tracked at the level that actually sells. Cart and wishlist follow the shopper across their devices, so a basket started on a phone is still there on a laptop.
Because customers are not all in one country, the store shows prices in Naira and lets shoppers view them in US dollars or British pounds using live exchange rates, while payment runs cleanly through Paystack. Shipping works across Nigeria, the UK, and the US, with rates the team controls and a free shipping threshold they can set. And the follow up runs itself: order confirmations, welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, and restock alerts all go out automatically.
The part we engineered hardest is the part customers never see: the money path. Checkout is built so that no matter how a payment confirms, a customer is never double charged and an order is never processed twice. In e-commerce, that is the thing that must never break, and we built it not to.
A dashboard that runs the whole business
The second product is the admin dashboard, and this is where the brand actually took control. From one place, the team manages the full catalog with variants and product images, processes orders with status tracking and automatic shipping notifications, and watches payments and revenue at a glance.
It goes well beyond a basic store admin. There is a full affiliate program with referral tracking, commission rates, and payout management, so the brand can turn happy customers into a sales force. There is store credit for rewarding referrals, multi country shipping rates with exchange rate control, category management, review moderation, customer profiles with full order history, and a messaging inbox with replies. More than ten sections in all, every one searchable, filterable, and usable on a phone. The team runs the entire business themselves, with no developer in the loop.
The result
Evvy Hairs went from renting space on a marketplace to owning a complete platform: their store, their customer relationships, their data, and their growth. Brand, payments, shipping, affiliates, and content, all under one roof and under their control.
Thinking about your own store?
If your business is stuck paying commissions and handing your customers to a marketplace, you do not have to stay there. At Icoweb Agency we build custom online stores and the dashboards that run them, designed for your products, your customers, and the way you want to grow.
Start a conversation at icowebagency.com.
