A transparent shopping experience across six categories, with clear product pages, calm flows and headless Shopify underneath.
Actually Fair is a shopping site built around one idea: the price you see
should make sense.
The store sells across athleisure, backpacks and travel gear, sunglasses, jewelry, electronics, and skincare and grooming. It runs as a live, self-hosted storefront with real payments, real inventory and cash on delivery, and it is selling today.
Revenue growth
Monthly, in this period, with a significant Meta ads push alongside
~8
Self-hosted services in the stack behind the storefront
6
Product categories on one calm catalog
Online stores often keep pricing and sourcing opaque. Reference prices are inflated, the sale never ends, and the shopper has no way to tell what anything should actually cost.
Actually Fair's bet is that a store can win on the opposite: show fair pricing plainly, on every product, and let that be the brand. The catch is that this turns pricing into a design problem. If the math is legible on one page and hidden on the next, the promise collapses.
There was a craft problem alongside the business one. The store ran on a stock Shopify theme, and the theme could no longer give the design the control the brand needed.
These are the three people I designed for, reconstructed from the catalog and how the store sells. Every layout decision was checked against one of them.
Burned by staged sales
“Every discount is staged until the math says otherwise.”
One thumb, two minutes
“If the price needs a second tap, I am gone.”
Account, orders, a wish list
“Let me ask for what you do not stock yet.”
The path the design optimizes for, mapped from the live store's flows. Its job is to keep every screen honest about what the shopper is feeling at that step.
Every step is a chance for the pricing promise to break.
| Layer | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Actions | Lands from an ad or search on a category or product | Compares selling price, reference price and photos | Adds to cart, picks COD or online payment | Tracks the order, browses what is new |
| Thoughts | Is this another fake-sale store? | What should this actually cost? | Will checkout waste my time? | Did I get what the page promised? |
| Emotions | Guarded | Comparing | Impatient | Judging the promise |
| Touchpoints | Category grid, price badges | Product page, reviews, pricing block | Cart, members area, COD checkout | Order updates, Make A Wish, new arrivals |
| Pain | Grids that hide the real price until the click | Reference prices that cannot be believed | Forced accounts and surprise charges | No way to ask for what is missing |
| Opportunity | Discount math on every card, before any click | Same math repeated in the same shape | Familiar Indian checkout patterns, COD first | Wish requests turn dead ends into a conversation |
The shopper's alternatives are not other boutique stores. They are the default ways India buys online, and each one trains a habit the store has to answer.
Where Actually Fair sits: the catalog discipline of a marketplace, the accountability of a store that puts its own name on the pricing, and none of the noise. The brand wins only if the math survives every screen, which is a harder design brief than looking premium.
I worked on the store as technical lead, end to end: the storefront, the backend services and the internal tooling the team works in.
The work shipped against real constraints:
A live store. Changes went out against real orders and real inventory, not a staging playground.
A self-hosted budget. The stack had to stay cheap to run, so it is built from parts the store owns rather than rented platforms.
Shoppers trained by Indian ecommerce. Cash on delivery, a members area and familiar cart patterns are expectations, not features.
The store moved off the stock Shopify theme to a headless Next.js and Tailwind build. Shopify still owns products, cart and checkout; everything the shopper sees is ours to design. The tradeoff is real, a theme is free and headless is work, but the brand lives in the details of how prices and products are presented, and those details were exactly what the theme would not give up.
Fair pricing is enforced at the component level, not the copy level. Every product card shows the selling price next to the reference price with the percentage off, and the product page and cart repeat the same math in the same shape. It is a rule about what components must render, which is the only way a promise survives every screen.
Whatever Shopify does not cover became a small service we own, self-hosted on Railway: a reviews service so social proof lives in the store's own database, an order-ingestion webhook service that keeps internal tooling in sync as orders land, and a custom CMS, because Sanity was not a fit for this team's workload. Owning the services changes what features cost: something like Make A Wish, where shoppers ask for a product the catalog does not carry yet, is a small build inside our own stack instead of a plugin hunt. It turns a gap in inventory into a conversation, and every request is a signal about what to stock next.
The catalog is wide, so the browsing has to stay calm. Categories sit in a predictable order, each with its own landing view: athleisure, backpacks and travel, sunglasses, jewelry, electronics, and skincare, with new arrivals surfaced per category. No department is more than one tap away, and no page asks the shopper to hunt.
Best sellers carry the discount math on the card itself, so the deal is legible before a single product page opens. The grid does the selling; the product page only has to confirm it.
The visual system is deliberately quiet: one warm paper, real blacks, one navy, and a single typeface doing all the work. These are the actual values the store ships with.
transparent pricing on every product. no, for real.
That line is the store's whole pitch, and the design treats it as a contract rather than a slogan. The percentage off sits on the card as a badge, the reference price sits next to the selling price, and the shopper never has to take the deal on faith.
Selling price, reference price and percentage off are visible before a single product page opens. The deal is never a mystery.
The grid, the product page and the cart repeat the pricing block in the same shape, so the promise cannot drift between screens.
No countdown timers, no fake urgency. The discount stands on its own, which is what makes it believable.
The same rule holds in the cart. The shopper never has to wonder whether the price changed between the grid and the checkout, because it is the same number, presented the same way, the whole way through.
The cart and login flows follow familiar Indian ecommerce patterns: a persistent cart, a members area, and cash on delivery at checkout. Nothing about paying asks the shopper to learn a new pattern, which matters for a young brand that has no trust surplus to spend.
The storefront is refined against evidence, not taste alone. PostHog A/B tests run against the live store, and the results guide what ships, with particular attention to the mobile experience. The loop is simple: change one surface, watch what shoppers do, keep what earns itself.
Mobile gets the attention because that is where the shoppers are. Layout, tap targets, load order and the placement of the pricing math were all tuned through these passes until the small screen stopped being the compromised version of the store.
The operational moment this stack lives for is the minute an order lands: nobody exports anything, nobody copies anything, and the store's own tooling already knows.
The minute an order lands
A shopper checks out on the storefront, COD or online payment. From here on, nobody exports or copies anything by hand.
Next: Shopify fires a webhook
Headless Shopify owns products, cart and checkout, and announces every order event the moment it happens.
Next: Ingestion service catches it
The order-ingestion service, one of the custom services I built, catches every event as it lands.
Next: Internal tooling in sync · Custom services on Railway
The tooling the team works in reflects the order immediately. No CSV exports at night.
Next: Team acts on live data
Fulfillment and merchandising decisions run on what the store is doing right now.
Everything the shopper sees is ours to design; Shopify stays the engine underneath.
Next: Headless Shopify
Products, cart and checkout. The one rented piece, kept where it is strongest.
Reviews, order ingestion, the custom CMS and Make A Wish: small services the store owns, self-hosted on Railway.
The storefront is Next.js and Tailwind talking to headless Shopify for products, cart and checkout. Around that core, the stack runs about eight services, self-hosted on Railway. The custom ones I built cover reviews, order ingestion, the custom CMS and the rest of what the store needs beyond Shopify.
The limit worth naming: the storefront can make pricing legible, but it cannot make pricing fair. That part is the business keeping the promise the components repeat.
A live headless Shopify storefront with clear product pages and calm flows, across six product categories, with cash on delivery, a members area and a wish-request channel. Under it, a set of custom services and internal tools that the store runs on every day.
Over the period this work was shipping, the store's monthly revenue grew, with a significant Meta ads push driving much of it alongside the site itself. The storefront and the services behind it carried their share.
Exact revenue figures stay private at the store's request.
The interesting constraint was that "fair" is a design requirement, not a marketing one. Every surface, from the product card to the checkout, has to hold the same promise or the brand falls apart. Most of the work was not making the claim louder, but making it survive contact with every screen.