ORBT Labs
Lake Forest · Stripe-direct shop

Stripe-direct ecommerce in Lake Forest.

A custom storefront built straight on Stripe — your brand, your data, your domain. No Shopify, no third-party lock-in. Built for the tech-product makers, light-industrial brands, and wellness operators around Lake Forest.

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

Lake Forest sells engineered products and the brands behind them.

Lake Forest is eighty-six thousand people with a tech and light-industrial base — Foothill Ranch and the business parks are full of companies that design and make physical product — plus family retail and a growing wellness scene. The seller that fits here often has an engineered product: a hardware accessory, a designed object, a small-batch manufactured good, or a wellness brand with a considered range. The buyer cares about specs and quality, and the product earns the sale on its own merits.

Put a product company on Shopify and the spec-level detail that sells the thing gets squeezed into a theme's product page, while the monthly fee and apps tax a maker watching unit economics. A buyer evaluating an engineered product wants the dimensions, the materials, the why — and a stock template wasn't built to carry that. The platform gets in the way of the exact information that closes the sale.

Stripe-direct removes the platform. Stripe handles the money; the product page, the cart, the checkout, and the receipt are written from scratch with room for the specs, the diagrams, the detail. You pay the processing fee and no monthly rent. For a Lake Forest product maker, the storefront has to do justice to a product that was engineered, not just listed.

02 — What we build

The whole shop, written from scratch.

  • Custom storefront on your domain — catalog, inventory, cart, and a checkout flow written to match the brand instead of a theme drawer.
  • Stripe wired in directly — payments land in your account from day one. No Stripe Connect markup, no platform layer taking a slice on top of processing.
  • Transactional email through Resend — confirmation, shipping update, receipt — written in your voice, sent from your domain, signed by you.
  • Up to roughly thirty SKUs at this tier. A brewery with twelve current cans plus glassware fits. A biotech merch run with fifteen pieces fits. Larger catalogs we quote separately.
  • Product schema and entity markup so Google and the AI engines can read the catalog properly — important when a customer asks ChatGPT for a recommendation.
  • No theme to migrate, no app store to rent from, no platform breakage when somebody pushes a release on the other side of the country.

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

03 — What this looks like

Three Lake Forest shops, three shapes of the same build.

A hardware or accessory maker selling direct. Fifteen SKUs of designed product. Each page carries the spec table, the materials, the dimensioned drawing, the use case — not a bare image and a price. Stripe takes the card, inventory tracks against the production run, and the build hands over clean. The receipt matches the brand a buyer chose on the strength of the detail.

A light-industrial brand opening a direct channel. A small-batch manufactured good sold straight to customers at a better margin than the reseller path. Stripe moves the payment with no platform layer on top, the page reads like the maker, and there's no monthly app subscription on a unit-economics-sensitive line.

A wellness brand with a considered range. A dozen products sold to a quality-minded local base. The look matches the brand, the checkout is one screen, and product schema is in place so an AI assistant can recommend the line when someone searches around Lake Forest.

This works when the catalog is small enough to design around, the brand carries weight, and the operator wants the code in their own account. It does not work for a thousand-variant inventory, a full warehouse system, wholesale-and-retail seller logins, or a stack of Shopify apps. For those, Shopify Plus is the honest answer and we will tell you so before you sign rather than build the wrong tool.

Studio HQ is in San Diego, with Lake Forest reachable in about seventy-five minutes. Most of the build runs remote, with an on-site day around Foothill Ranch or the shop floor when a job warrants it. The handoff lands on your domain, with your Stripe keys, with the source in a repository you own. One person doing the work. That is the point of the price and the speed.

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

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