Six years running our own store. What it taught us.

We have run SPQR Shop, a bespoke jewellery brand, since 2020. Not as a portfolio piece. As a business we own, with real stock, real customers, real returns, and real months where the numbers were not good.

It is the reason we talk about online stores the way we do. Most of what we know about what breaks in a shop, we learned by having it break in ours.

The catalogue grew faster than the store could carry it.

By 2023 the catalogue had grown to roughly two thousand products, and page speed had collapsed. Nothing dramatic caused it. It was ordinary accumulation: more products, more images, more variants, more of everything, on a setup that had been perfectly fine when the shop was a tenth of the size.

The lesson is that a store does not fail on a particular day. It degrades, slowly enough that you adjust to it, until you are the last person able to feel how slow your own shop has become.

From the inside it does not look like a failure at all. There is no error message. There is a product page you quietly stop opening on your phone because you know the wait. There are better photographs from the photographer that you shrink before uploading. There is a category you decide not to add, because the shop already feels heavy and you would rather not make it worse.

We migrated to Shopify in 2023, and sales doubled.

We moved the shop to Shopify that year. Sales doubled after the migration.

We want to be careful with that number, because it is ours and not a promise about yours. We cannot tell you how much of it came from the store being fast again, how much from a simpler checkout, and how much from being able to change things ourselves without booking a developer first. What we know is that taking the friction out moved the business, and that we would not have believed how much friction we were carrying until it was gone.

It is also not the headline we would put on our own front page, and the reason is worth saying out loud. A doubling on a store that had been degrading for years tells you more about how bad the starting point had become than about how good the destination is. The useful part is not the multiple. It is that what we had been reading as the limit of demand turned out to be friction.

The shop is not a project we finished.

We run its revenue channel day to day: the ads, the pages, the checkout, the numbers. That is a different relationship with a store than building one and handing it over.

It is also where most of our opinions come from. When we argue about where a shipping cost should appear on a product page, we are not quoting a best-practice article. We are remembering what happened to our own abandoned carts when we got it wrong.

The other thing it does is make us carry our own advice. If we recommend something and it turns out to be wrong, we do not hear about it from a client six months later. We see it in our own numbers that month, which is a faster and more honest teacher than any amount of reading.

What running our own shop actually taught us.

• The owner is the last person who can see the store as a stranger sees it. You know where everything is, so you cannot feel what is hard to find.
• Speed is not a technical metric. It is the number of people who were willing to wait, and you never meet the ones who were not.
• Every plugin that solves a small problem adds a small permanent cost. Ten of them is not ten small costs, it is a store nobody wants to touch.
• The work does not end at launch. A store nobody edits for a year is a store that is quietly getting worse.

None of this is a strategy you can copy. It is why we ask the questions we ask when we look at someone else's shop.

We build stores the way we run ours, and we say so on the store page. See how we build online stores.