Feel like a niche house, run like a small shop.
Perfume is bought on feeling, so the store had to look and move like the international houses its customers already know. That was the easy half of the brief.
The harder half was running it. The site had to live on an ordinary shared hosting plan, the kind almost every Pakistani business already pays for, and be uploaded, backed up and updated by someone who is not a developer. That ruled out most of the modern toolbox before a line of code was written.
Then payment. Cash on delivery is how most of Pakistan pays online, and many customers would rather send money by JazzCash, Easypaisa or bank transfer and share a screenshot than type a card number. The checkout had to treat both as normal, not as workarounds.
- A storefront built to sellCollections, edits for him and her, best sellers and search
- Scent Finder quizFive questions to three matching perfumes, nothing stored
- A checkout for PakistanCash on delivery, plus bank, JazzCash and Easypaisa transfers
- Proof of paymentCustomers upload a screenshot and the shop team confirms it
- Order trackingCustomers check an order without creating an account
- An admin that fits a phoneOrders, products, coupons and page content, all on a phone screen
Three choices that shaped the build.
Each one traded a little of our convenience for a lot of the client's.
Plain PHP, on purpose
A framework would have been quicker for us to write and harder for the client to run. With no build step and no package manager on the server, the whole shop is a folder and a database, and a one-time installer sets it up from a ZIP.
Proof of payment, built in
A wallet or bank transfer only works if someone can check it. Customers upload their payment screenshot at checkout, it lands on the order in the admin, and the shop team confirms it before the order ships.
Two databases, one codebase
Shared hosts hand out MariaDB as often as MySQL. The schema and sample data were loaded and checked on both before they counted as done, so a change of plan or host does not break the shop.
Luxury that still loads on a phone.
Measured with Google's Lighthouse mobile test against skyfragrances.com. You can run the same test yourself.
out of 100 on Google's mobile performance test
for the homepage's main content to appear on a phone
build steps: the whole shop is a folder and a database
Live, and in the client's hands.
Before handover the shop went through a 97-item acceptance checklist, with a real test order placed on every payment method and the admin checked at phone size. The client received the site as a ZIP, a go-live guide written for someone who is not a developer, and a handover document listing every setting and where it lives.
The store is new, so we are not quoting traffic or sales figures. The numbers on this page are the ones anyone can check today.
Launching a brand online in Pakistan?
If you want a store that looks the part, takes the payments your customers actually use, and stays simple enough to run yourself, we should talk.