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AI/Productprivate client

AI Print-on-Demand Store

AI-assisted ecommerce storefront integrated with Printify’s print-on-demand network, with AI-generated product artwork and listings and Stripe checkout end to end.

Sector
Ecommerce / print-on-demand
Engagement
Build — storefront, AI layer and fulfilment
Timeline
Mar 2024 → Jul 2024
Team
1 full-stack engineer, 1 backend engineer
01 — The problem

Launching a print-on-demand brand took a design session, a listing session and a fulfilment session — for every single product.

The client sold apparel through a print-on-demand supplier and every product was assembled by hand. Artwork came from a freelance designer, copy was written in a document, mockups were exported from the supplier dashboard one at a time, and the finished listing was retyped into a storefront that had no connection to the fulfilment side. A ten-product drop took the better part of a week, which meant the catalogue never moved fast enough to test what actually sold.

The commerce side was no better. Orders placed on the storefront were pushed to the supplier manually, so a missed message meant a shirt that was paid for and never printed. Variant pricing drifted out of sync with supplier costs, refunds were reconciled by reading two dashboards side by side, and nobody could say with confidence what a given product earned after print and shipping.

02 — How we solved it

What we built, and why in that order

01
AI at the top of the catalogue
A generation pipeline turns a prompt or a theme into product artwork, then into a title, description and tags written for the storefront rather than for a model. Every output lands in a review queue — the owner approves, edits or discards before anything becomes a product.
02
Printify as the source of truth
Blueprints, print providers, variants and costs are pulled from the Printify API instead of being retyped. Approved artwork is uploaded, mockups are generated per variant, and publishing a product creates it on both sides in one action.
03
Stripe checkout, webhook fulfilment
Checkout runs on Stripe with server-side price and stock validation, so totals cannot be tampered with client-side. Order creation happens on the Stripe webhook, idempotently keyed, and only a confirmed payment submits a print order — removing the manual hand-off entirely.
04
One typed system
A NestJS API on AWS owns products, orders, webhooks and the generation queue; the Next.js storefront renders from the same typed contracts with product pages statically generated and revalidated on publish. Margin per variant is computed from live supplier cost rather than estimated.
StackNext.jsReactTypeScriptNestJSPrintify APIStripeAWS
Outcome
5 days → 2 hrs
To publish a ten-product drop
100%
Orders fulfilled without manual entry
0
Payments taken without a print order
Catalogue size in the first quarter
We stopped deciding which products were worth the effort of making, because making one stopped being an effort.
Founder, ecommerce client
03 — Where they are now

The store runs as one system: generate, approve, publish, sell, fulfil — with a person only at the approval step.

Our role: Full-stack product engineering

Product ideas that used to be too speculative to justify a design brief now cost a prompt and a review click, so the catalogue is tested rather than curated. The owner runs small themed drops, keeps what sells and archives the rest, and the supplier integration keeps costs and variants correct without anyone maintaining a spreadsheet.

Since handover the client has extended the same pipeline to seasonal collections and a second print provider. Our remaining involvement is the AI generation layer — prompt and model routing as image quality and pricing change — while the commerce surfaces are maintained in-house.

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