What we built
Every entry here started as something a maker on nook ran into. That’s the whole method: a small number of real shops, watched closely, and the thing they needed built that week.
Choose how your shop frames product photos, in Settings → Storefront: each photo’s own shape, portrait 4:5, tall 3:4, square or landscape. Photos added from Safari now upload as small WebP files too, a sixth of the size they were, and every photo gets a thumbnail-sized copy, so the dashboard loads as quickly as the shop.
Because A founding shop shoots portrait on a 40-megapixel camera and saw its photos cropped square, while Safari was quietly sending them up four times heavier than other browsers.
An assistant helping someone find a present can search your shop, read a product in full, see what postage costs to wherever they live, and send them to your basket with everything already in it. They check it and pay on your checkout, like any other buyer. It uses the open standard Google and others are building for this, so it works for every nook shop without you setting anything up.
Because Being findable is only half of it: an assistant that finds a maker’s piece should be able to hand the buyer straight to it, not to a search page.
Every product page now tells search engines and AI assistants what it costs, whether it’s in stock, what UK postage is and how long it takes, and who made it and where. Your shop has a product link to give Google Merchant Center once, after which your products can appear in Google Shopping and keep themselves up to date. When something sells out or changes price, nook tells Bing within minutes.
Because More people now ask an assistant what to buy, and a small shop’s products should be as easy for one to read as a big retailer’s.
Choose several photos at once and they upload side by side; drag them into order, and the first is the cover. Up to eight per product. Any size straight from the camera works: nook resizes each photo for the web as it uploads, so pages stay quick for shoppers, and strips out the camera details and location a phone photo carries.
Because A founding shop shoots on a 40-megapixel camera and had to shrink every photo in Photoshop before nook would take it, then add them one at a time.
Give each product its packed weight and parcel size once, and nook prices postage at checkout from Royal Mail’s own rates, wherever the buyer is. A basket goes as one parcel, buyers choose tracked or next day, and parcels leaving the UK come with a plain note about import charges. Set where you post from, add a packaging cost or free postage over an amount, and whoever packs gets each order by email.
Because A founding shop wanted to sell beyond the UK, and the person who packs his orders was pricing every parcel by hand.
Payments are set up on a page in your dashboard, with Stripe’s form sitting right there: your ID, your bank details, a phone number for receipts. Stripe opens a small window once to make your login, and the rest happens in nook. You’re never dropped into Stripe’s own dashboard wondering if it worked.
Because A founding shop answered a long run of questions on Stripe’s site and ended up somewhere that looked like a test account, with no way to tell whether payments were connected.
Add one record where your domain is managed and yourshop.com reaches your shop as well as www.yourshop.com, certificate included. Settings shows the exact record for your provider, and tells you once it’s working.
Because A founding shop’s www address worked while the bare one showed their registrar’s parking page, and the only fix was a forwarding feature buried in the registrar’s menus.
Product and event forms are laid out as cards in two columns, with price and stock beside what you’re writing. Every box, dropdown and button is the same size and style, and your orders and events read properly on a phone.
Because Walking a new producer through it, the forms sat in a narrow strip with half the screen empty, and no two boxes matched.
What was bought, who by, and where it’s going, sent to you the moment it’s paid. Reply to the email and you’re writing to the buyer. If a batch sells out in five minutes you get a handful of emails, not sixty.
Because Until now you only found out about a sale by opening the dashboard. The work is at the bench, not on a screen.
A shop with nothing on it yet used to say "nothing here right now". Now it says you’re opening soon and takes an email, so you open to a list rather than to silence. When you’re ready, one button in your dashboard emails everyone once, with a note in your own words.
Because One of the founding shops had a live domain, a following, and an empty page for a fortnight while the products were being photographed.
A slider under the logo upload, from half size to double, with a live preview. And an SVG exported with a white artboard behind it no longer brings the white box with it.
Because A wordmark that looked right in the file looked tiny in the header.
Shop, Selling, Storefront, Domain & email, Account. Links from the setup guide land on the right tab, and Save says "Saved" for a moment so you know it did.
Because One long page had become a scroll to find the thing you came for.
Point a domain you own at your shop and it serves your storefront, certificate included; your nook address keeps working and forwards there. The settings page shows the exact records for your registrar (GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Namecheap and the rest), every value is click-to-copy, and nook checks for you every ten minutes until it’s live, then emails you.
Because GoDaddy wouldn’t accept the record for a bare domain, and the first shop to try it had to be talked through www by hand. Now the page explains it.
Tŷ Fferm becomes ty-fferm in a web address, not t-fferm. Letters with accents are turned into their plain equivalents rather than dropped, and a stray space at the end of a name no longer becomes a stray hyphen.
Because A Welsh shop name lost a letter at signup.
On a brand-new shop’s first visit the checklist is open, not folded into a corner, and it has an optional step for your own domain.
Because A new seller stood at an empty dashboard and didn’t know what to do next. The guide was there; it was just closed.
Sell at a market or from the workshop door and the stock comes off the same count the website uses, so you can’t sell online what you sold on Saturday. Mistakes can be undone.
Because Most makers sell more in person than online, and the two counts never agreed.