ORBT Labs
Encinitas · custom storefront

Stripe-direct ecommerce in Encinitas.

A custom storefront on Stripe — your design, your domain, your data. No Shopify tax. Built for shapers, yoga studios, and boutique restaurants in 101 country.

Start a brief Or email hello@orbtlabs.com
01 — Why this, here

Encinitas runs on small, distinctive brands. Shopify flattens them.

Drive Highway 101 from Leucadia down through Downtown to Cardiff and the pattern repeats: a shaper with a side rack of tees, a yoga studio with house-printed mats, a chef-led restaurant pushing hot sauce and a cookbook from the host stand. The product mix is small. The brand is everything. The buyer found you on Instagram, walked in once, and now wants the same feeling online.

Shopify will get a store live in a weekend. It will also stamp that store with the same checkout, the same fonts, the same "view cart" drawer that ten thousand other DTC brands ship. For a Leucadia surf label or an Olivenhain wellness studio, that sameness is the whole problem. The brand is the product. The platform is fighting the brand.

Stripe-direct is a different deal. Stripe handles the money. We handle everything else — the layout, the product page, the cart, the checkout, the receipt email — written from scratch around how your shop actually wants to feel. You pay Stripe's payment processing and nothing on top. No monthly platform fee. No theme to lose when Shopify ships a breaking change. No app store rent for features that should have been free.

02 — What we build

The shop, end to end.

  • Custom storefront on your domain — product catalog, inventory, cart, and checkout written to your brand, not pulled from a theme library.
  • Stripe wired directly — payments hit your account from day one. No Stripe Connect markup, no platform middle layer skimming.
  • Transactional email through Resend — order confirmation, shipping update, receipt. Written in your voice, sent from your domain.
  • Up to roughly thirty SKUs at this tier. A shaper with eight board models in three sizes fits. A studio with mats, blocks, and a small apparel run fits. Bigger catalogs we quote separately.
  • Schema markup and product entity data so Google and the AI search engines can read your catalog cleanly — not just index it.
  • No theme migration risk, ever. The code is yours. There is nothing to upgrade because there is no platform to upgrade you.

From $5,500 · ~3 weeks · Owner-operated.

03 — What this looks like

Three Encinitas shops, three shapes of the same build.

A Leucadia shaper selling boards and apparel. Eight board models, each with a deep page — outline, dimensions, suggested wave range, a paragraph from the shaper himself. A small apparel rack of tees, hoodies, and a wax-and-leash bundle for walk-in regulars who now live in Phoenix. The board pages don't look like product pages. They look like the shaper's notebook. Checkout is two screens. Inventory updates the second a board is glassed and tagged.

A Cardiff yoga studio selling mats and branded merch. The studio runs four daily classes and a teacher-training cohort twice a year. The shop sells house-printed mats, blocks, straps, a small clothing line, and a digital download of the morning sequence the founder filmed last spring. Stripe handles the physical SKUs and the download fulfillment in the same checkout. The studio's color palette runs through every page. The booking platform stays where it is — we do not try to replace it. The shop just feels like the studio.

A Downtown Encinitas restaurant selling sauces and a cookbook. The chef ferments a house hot sauce, jars it once a month, and the cookbook came out last winter. Six SKUs total — three sauces, the book, a tea towel, a gift box. The shop runs from a single page with a tall product grid and a sticky cart, no theme drawer, no shipping calculator surprise at the third screen. The restaurant's brand — the same one on the menu — runs the whole experience. Local pickup is one of the shipping options. Out-of-state cookbook orders are the other.

This is right when your catalog is small, your brand is the asset, and you want to own the code. It is not right if you need a thousand variants, a full warehouse management system, marketplace seller logins, or twenty Shopify apps doing twenty different jobs. For those, Shopify Plus is the honest answer and we will say so.

North County SD — in-person reachable inside an hour. The studio is in San Diego, which puts a kickoff coffee in Encinitas firmly inside a workday. Most of the build happens remote. The handoff happens on your domain, with your Stripe keys, with the source code in a repo you own. We are one person, not a team. That is the point of the price and the point of the speed.

This page was drafted from a structured brief and hand-reviewed before launch. The work itself is custom, owner-operated, never templated.

Have a project in mind?

One paragraph is enough. Start a brief →

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