We've Built a Fully Custom E-commerce Site for Proboxing

Coded has built a fully custom e-commerce site for Proboxing, from the ground up. It is not a theme on a hosted platform. It is a store and an admin system we designed, wrote, and now run as one product.

The live shop is at proboxing.com.au.

The storefront and the dashboard

The front end is Vue, Inertia, and Laravel. Shoppers get custom checkout, email notifications, free gift with purchase, and pre-order support. Images are served as WebP. Pages are built to be SEO-friendly. Customer support messaging sits in the same build, so the team can talk to customers without bolting on a separate helpdesk.

Behind the storefront is a custom Vue and Inertia admin dashboard. Staff manage products and stock from one place, with Stripe connected for payments. It is a full management system for the store, not a plugin panel with the bits that matter hidden three screens deep.

Maintenance and deployments, kept in step with AI

We keep maintenance and deployments in the same workflow we use to write the product. The codebase, the review, and the release path are set up so language models can help us move through changes quickly (a patch, a new promotion rule, a stock behaviour) without leaving the stack we already trust.

That does not mean the store deploys itself. It means a small team can ship often because the app is ours, the tests sit next to the code, and AI is in the loop for development and release, not sitting outside it as a separate tool.

Where hosted platforms are feeling the squeeze

Shopify and other SaaS commerce platforms still do a job. The landscape around them has shifted. Highly performant, AI-assisted development makes a custom store cheaper and faster to evolve than it was five years ago.

On a hosted platform you wait on their roadmap, their checkout rules, and whatever the plugin directory allows. When the market wants a pre-order, a gift with purchase, or a warehouse flow that does not match the template, you stack apps. Each app is another subscription, another upgrade risk, and another place the customer journey can snag.

AI-assisted development does not remove the need for judgement. It does mean a tight Laravel and Vue codebase can take those requests as product work, not as a hunt for the next plugin.

Why custom still pays

A custom e-commerce build lets us tailor the experience to the market Proboxing actually sells into: boxing and training gear, not a generic catalogue. There is no plugin tax. Running costs stay with hosting, Stripe, and email, not a bundle of apps that each take a cut. Control stays with the business: checkout, stock, gifts, pre-orders, and support all live in one system we can change.

You also own the shape of the data. That matters when the store, the dashboard, and the mobile app need to stay in sync.

A clean stack we can reuse

We keep the stack small on purpose: Laravel on the server, Vue and Inertia on the client, Stripe for payments. Patterns we prove on one build (checkout, catalogues, stock, messaging) go back into the next, so we are not inventing a new architecture every time.

That is how we maximise efficiency and cut risk. Fewer moving parts means fewer limitations and less friction when something needs to change. The Proboxing store is the proof of that approach in production, not a slide in a deck.

If you are weighing a hosted platform against a store you actually own, have a look at the work or talk to us.