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We build one thing exceptionally well for one kind of business: fast, beautiful storefronts for music retailers. The architecture below is the engine behind the Music Storefront Design — a premium front end built in Astro and served from AWS that makes your store look as good online as it does in person, while your existing checkout, accounts, and rental system are left exactly as they are.
The one idea that runs through everything:
We design the part customers see and judge you by — the front door. We never touch the plumbing behind it. That single boundary is what makes this fast, safe, and risk-free for your business.
The Astro Front Door
Core BuildYour new storefront is built on a modern framework called Astro and served from Amazon Web Services. In plain terms: the pages customers see first — your homepage, departments, and landing pages — are rebuilt to be fast, modern, and beautiful, then deployed on enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure that never slows down.
Non-Technical Translation:
Think of your website as a building. We don't rebuild the warehouse, the registers, or the back office. We rebuild the storefront — the windows, the entrance, the first impression — so the moment a parent lands on their phone, your shop looks like the best in town.
- → Astro Islands — Near-Zero JavaScript Astro ships almost no unnecessary code to the browser, so pages load instantly on a phone. Speed is part of the design, not an afterthought.
- → AWS Serverless Delivery Your front end is served from global cloud infrastructure that scales automatically. It stays fast during a back-to-school rental rush or any traffic spike.
- → Built to a Real Performance Bar We build to a strict internal standard — mobile Lighthouse 98+, sub-1.2-second load — so the delivered site over-performs, every time. (Our written delivery warranty is set comfortably below that, so the promise is always safe to keep.)
The Boundary: What We Rebuild, What We Leave Alone
Zero Backend RiskThe single most important thing to understand about our work is the line we draw. We rebuild the front of house. We never touch your back of house. Your "Shop," "My Account," and "Rent" buttons deep-link straight into the system you already run.
Non-Technical Translation:
You keep your existing checkout, your customer accounts, your rental contracts, and your payment processing — exactly as they are today. We make the part customers see first stunning. When they're ready to buy or rent, they cross into the system you already trust. No migration. No data risk. No downtime.
We Rebuild
- → Homepage & first impression
- → Department & category pages
- → Landing & campaign pages
- → Content & SEO pages
We Leave Untouched
- → Checkout & payment processing
- → Customer accounts
- → Rental contracts & enrollment
- → Inventory & back-office systems
An honest word about the "seam":
On most stores, a customer crosses from our beautiful new pages into your existing storefront when they go to buy or rent. There's a brief visual hand-off at that moment. We state this plainly rather than hide it — because the front door is what wins or loses the first impression, and that's where this work pays for itself. For stores on Shopify, we can remove that hand-off entirely (see L-03).
Three Levels of Design
Good / Better / BestEvery music retailer can buy in, whatever their store runs on. Three tiers map to how much of the experience we rebuild — and the deepest tier depends on your platform.
Front Door
$7,000
flat · ~5–7 business days
Homepage plus up to four core pages (about, contact, departments, one landing page), rebuilt in Astro on AWS. Mobile-perfect, sub-second load. Buttons deep-link to your existing store.
Works on any stackStorefront Design
$12,000
flat · ~2–3 weeks
Tier 1 plus your full department, category, content, and campaign pages. The whole browse experience is reskinned; only the final transaction lives in your existing system.
Works on any stackElite Rebuild
$25,000
flat · ~4–6 weeks
A true headless storefront — full catalog, product, and cart rebuilt in Astro with zero visual seam right up to the hosted checkout. The seamless showcase build.
Shopify stores onlyThe technical reality behind the tiers:
A full headless rebuild (Tier 3) is genuinely straightforward on Shopify, because Shopify exposes a clean Storefront API our Astro front end can read from. On Active-e / ASP.NET and most custom platforms, there is no such clean storefront API — those systems sync over file exchange (SFTP/CSV). So for those stores we deliver the marketing-layer design (Tier 1–2) that links out, and we say so plainly. We confirm your platform during a 15-minute pre-qualification check before recommending a tier — we never scope Tier 3 for a non-Shopify store.
Independent agencies quote headless Shopify builds at roughly $60,000–$250,000. Our AI-assisted build speed delivers the Elite Rebuild at a fraction of that while still commanding a premium flat fee. All three tiers are fixed-fee projects with no mandatory recurring component.
Frontend Isolation — The Safety Architecture
Core SafeguardOur storefronts never reach directly into your AIM/AIMsi system, your ERP, or any on-premise database. On Shopify builds, the front end reads only from the Shopify Storefront API. This isolation is a deliberate safeguard, not an accident of design.
Non-Technical Translation:
The new front end is sealed off from your sensitive back-office systems by design. That separation is exactly what lets us guarantee speed and keep your data safe — the customer experience is decoupled from the machinery behind it, so nothing we build can disturb what runs your business.
- → No Regulated-Data Contact A design that links out to your existing system never collects or stores student, minor, or payment data. None of those compliance obligations attach to the work we deliver here.
- → Your Existing Sync Stays Yours Where a store needs inventory kept current, we configure and harden your own licensed tools (such as Tri-Tech's Active-e module) rather than inserting a third party between you and your customers.
Performance, Proven and Documented
Measured ResultsA beautiful page that loads slowly fails our standard. Every build is measured against real performance metrics at delivery, and the numbers are documented so you can see exactly what you received.
- + Loads Instantly on a Phone We build to a mobile Lighthouse score of 98+, sub-1.2-second load, and near-zero layout shift. Scores are documented at handover.
- + A Warranty You Can Hold Us To If a delivered build misses the contractual performance floor on the agreed reference device, we refactor the code at no additional charge. The warranty floor sits below our build standard on purpose, so the promise is always safe to keep.
- + No Conversion Guarantee — and That's Honest We engineer technical performance. We don't promise a specific sales number, because revenue depends on your pricing, merchandising, and traffic. Any revenue estimates we share are illustrations for planning, never guarantees.
Checkout Guard
Shopify CheckoutA fixed-timeline engagement that migrates and hardens your Shopify checkout against the platform's 2026 deprecations — including the end of legacy Scripts and the retirement of checkout.liquid, Additional Scripts, and related script-tag customizations on non-Plus plans — and rebuilds your accessory cross-sell natively inside the new checkout.
Non-Technical Translation:
Shopify is retiring the old checkout technology many stores still rely on. When it switches off, custom discounts, upsells, and tracking can quietly stop working — often showing up first as lost sales, not an obvious error. We move your checkout onto Shopify's current framework before that happens, and protect the parts that make you money.
- → Migration to Supported Checkout Your checkout is moved onto Shopify's current extensibility framework with no performance degradation from your documented pre-migration baseline.
- → Native Accessory Cross-Sell Relevant add-ons — reeds, cases, stands, strings — are surfaced inside the new checkout to lift average order value, rebuilt natively rather than bolted on.
- → Scope & Terms Limited to the Shopify checkout layer. $3,500 flat. A B4 Revenue Retainer is a mandatory part of this engagement — it keeps the checkout monitored and stable as Shopify and your apps update, and the performance warranty is conditioned on it.
AI Sales Agent
Grounded RAGA retrieval-augmented (RAG) conversational sales layer over your commerce data. Before it answers a customer, it retrieves from your actual catalog, and a validation layer keeps responses tied to real, in-stock products to reduce inaccurate output.
Non-Technical Translation:
General chatbots answer from the open internet and sometimes invent things. This one looks at your live product data first, so its recommendations reflect what you actually stock. The quality of its answers depends directly on the quality and currency of the catalog data you provide.
- → Grounded in Your Catalog Product recommendations, stock questions, and rental routing are answered from your real inventory, not generic training data.
- → Validation Layer A grounding check keeps answers tied to real, in-stock products to reduce inaccurate output. Accuracy depends on the catalog and inventory data supplied for ingestion.
- → Scope & Terms For established retailers with a stable catalog and existing traffic. $35,000. A B4 Revenue Retainer is a mandatory part of this engagement, and the related warranties are conditioned on it.
Native Mobile Applications
Enterprise OnlyEnd-to-end engineering of platform-native iOS and Android commerce applications, written directly in Swift and Kotlin, not slow hybrid wrappers. This is available only under custom enterprise terms initiated by the retailer, and is not part of any standard offering.
Non-Technical Translation:
Instead of renting space in a mobile browser where a competitor is one tab away, you own a place directly on your customer's phone — with instant load, push notifications, and one-tap checkout. It's the deepest investment we offer, which is why we only build it when a large retailer comes to us asking for it.
- → Pure Swift & Kotlin Coded directly in Apple and Google's native languages for fluid performance, offline caching, and native Apple Pay / Google Wallet checkout.
- → Technical-Compliance Commitment Builds are engineered to meet the published technical guidelines of the Apple App Store and Google Play Store at submission. A technical-code rejection is refactored at no additional charge.
- → Scope & Terms Enterprise-initiated only. Scope, fees, and timeline are defined entirely by a bespoke Statement of Work.