A custom storefront wired straight into Stripe: your brand, your data, your domain. No Shopify, no monthly platform tax. Built for the Santee makers, outdoor-gear sellers, and trade shops that turn out a real product and want to ship it without a platform cut.
Santee is sixty thousand people in East County, built on the trades, light manufacturing, family services, and a strong outdoor-recreation streak with the lakes and trails right at the edge of town. Most of that is service and contract work. But the trade and outdoor base throws off real product: a fabrication shop selling a branded tool or rack, a maker turning out gear for the lake-and-trail crowd, a small manufacturer with a line that buyers reorder. Those are genuine Stripe-shop businesses.
A trade shop selling a branded fixture, or an outdoor maker selling a rack or a kit, rarely needs a consumer marketplace. They need a clean way for a buyer to order the part or the gear online: sometimes a repeat buyer, sometimes a new one who found the product and just wants to check out. Drop that into Shopify and you're renting a retail platform built for boutiques, with variants you don't have and a fee on top of processing.
Stripe-direct fits the shape of the work. Stripe moves the money. The catalog, the reorder flow, the product page with the real spec, the receipt that drops into a buyer's books: all written around how Santee shops actually sell. You pay the processing fee and nothing else. No platform layer skimming a shop that runs on trade margins.
A Santee fabrication shop with a branded product. A tool, a rack, a fixture the shop designed and now sells beyond Town Center. One deep product page: the spec, the material, the install, a voice memo from the maker transcribed under the photos. Out-of-area buyers, mostly. Checkout is one screen, inventory shows the real count, and the receipt formats clean for a buyer's records.
An outdoor-gear maker for the lake-and-trail crowd. A handful of SKUs: a rack, a kit, a piece of gear made for how people actually use Santee's outdoors. Honest stock, a one-screen checkout, and a store that matches the maker's brand instead of a Shopify theme with a logo on top. We wire it in under three weeks.
A Carlton Hills small manufacturer with a reorder line. A run of parts or kits the same buyers come back for. The store is built for reorder speed (part number, quantity, done) with a receipt formatted for expense systems. Stripe takes the card. No consumer-retail theme pretending this is a boutique.
This works when there's a real product, a small catalog to design around, and an operator who wants the code in their own account. It does not work for a thousand-variant inventory, a full warehouse or ERP system, marketplace seller logins, or a wall of apps. If the Santee business is pure service (trades or field work with nothing to ship), a shop is the wrong build and we'll say so on the first call.
Studio HQ is in San Diego, inside forty minutes to East County. In-person near Town Center or the business strip when a build warrants seeing the actual product and how it ships. The rest runs remote. The handoff lands on your domain, with your Stripe keys, with the source in a repository you own. One person doing the work. That's the point of the price and the speed.
This page was drafted from a structured outline and hand-reviewed before launch. The work itself is custom, owner-operated, never templated.
One paragraph about your business is enough. Or just email hola@xala.studio.