Case study · E-commerce
A product builder Wix does not ship
Kinetic Customs sell a hammer the customer designs themselves. That needs component-level stock and tax that changes by country, and none of it comes out of the box.
- Client
- Kinetic Customs, UK
- Sector
- E-commerce, engineered hand tools
- What we did
- UX, custom development, stock and tax logic
- Now
- Full rebuild on Wix Studio, final stages
The Wix Studio rebuild is in its final stages, so the live site is still the earlier build.
The brief
Not a product page problem
Kinetic Customs make premium custom framing hammers and hand tools in the UK, and sell them worldwide from their own site and through retailers abroad. The tools are milled and hand finished, and the whole proposition is that yours is not the same as anybody else's.
A standard product page assumes you are selling a thing. Kinetic Customs sell a set of parts and the freedom to combine them: head, handle, grip, finish. The number of finished combinations is far larger than the number of products any person would want to maintain by hand.
Two things break at that point. Stock stops being a number on a product, because a combination is only buyable if every component in it is in stock. And tax stops being a setting, because the price a customer should see depends on the country they are in.
They had spent a long time looking for a way through this and not finding one. That is the usual outcome, because the off-the-shelf answer to selling a configurable product assumes a catalogue of finished items, which is exactly what a made-to-order tool company does not have.
The build
What we built
All of it inside Wix, from scratch. No third-party configurator plugin, no embedded external shop, nothing bolted on that would need renting forever.
The configurator
Customers choose head, handle and grip as separate components, each with its own price, and build the tool up from there. Written from the ground up rather than assembled from an app, which is what made the two problems below solvable rather than something to apologise for.
Component-level stock
Availability is tracked against each component, not each finished product. If a handle is out of stock, every combination using that handle knows about it. Customers cannot order something that cannot be built, which is the failure that costs a small manufacturer far more than a lost sale.
Tax that follows the customer
Pricing adjusts VAT according to where the customer is, so the figure on screen is the figure that applies to them. For a business selling worldwide from the UK, getting this wrong is either a compliance problem or a checkout full of unpleasant surprises.
A rebuild on Wix Studio
The original configurator was built inside Wix Editor, because that is where the shop already lived. The whole site is now in the final stages of a complete rebuild on Wix Studio, carrying the same logic onto the platform we would choose today.
The outcome
What changed
They stopped having to choose between the two bad options. Without a configurator that understands components, a business in this position either limits what the customer is allowed to pick, which removes the reason people buy from them, or accepts orders it cannot actually build, which costs far more than the sale.
The software was built around how the business works rather than the business being reshaped to fit the software. That is the whole difference between a custom build and a plugin, and it is why it was worth doing properly.
We have no traffic or revenue figures to publish for this one, so we are not publishing any. What we can point at is the thing itself, still running, still doing a job that nothing off the shelf was going to do for them.
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