Lush Rituals is an online store for digital journals, guides and affirmation decks. A customer picks a product, pays, and within seconds receives an email with download links. No manual work, at any hour.
The challenge
Digital products sound simple: upload a PDF and sell it. In practice you need to solve:
- payments that work with cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay,
- instant delivery without sending anything by hand,
- file protection, so the PDF isn't shared freely,
- EU legal requirements for digital content (consent, right of withdrawal),
- a brand that feels premium and calm.
Why not Shopify or WooCommerce
Both are great platforms, but for this project they would have meant monthly subscriptions, plugins for digital delivery and design compromises. A custom Next.js store gave full control over the experience and lower running costs.
How a purchase works
- The customer chooses a product or bundle and enters an email.
- Payment runs through Stripe Checkout.
- Stripe notifies the store that the payment succeeded.
- The system prepares a copy of the PDF with a buyer watermark and sends an email with download links.
- A few days later, the customer gets an invitation to review the product.
For bundles, the customer gets a separate link for every product in the bundle.
What brings in traffic
A store without visitors is a store on a desert island. That's why Lush Rituals has:
- a blog with guides that answer what people search for on Google,
- a free PDF in exchange for an email, which builds a mailing list,
- structured data for products, reviews and FAQs,
- a Google Merchant feed for free product listings.
Cookieless analytics
Instead of relying only on third-party tools, the store has its own analytics: where visitors come from, which pages they read, how long they stay and where they drop off in the purchase funnel. Bots and the owner's own visits are excluded, so the numbers are honest.
The most important lesson: a big share of "visits" to a new site are bots. Without filtering, you'd make decisions on the wrong data.
The admin
In the admin, the owner manages products, prices, bundles, images and posts, reviews orders, approves reviews and exports the mailing list. GDPR export and erasure of customer data are included too.
Technology
Next.js, TypeScript, Stripe, Supabase (database and file storage), Prisma, Resend for email and Vercel for hosting.
The result
The store is live, payments and delivery are fully automatic, and the owner adds new products herself. See more in the case study.
Thinking about selling digital products? Get in touch.
