An e-commerce catalog built to scale past a handful of products.
An e-commerce catalog built to scale past a handful of products.
Botanic Bonsai makes handmade wood pieces in Yekaterinburg — bonsai trees, wall clocks cut from oak and walnut slabs, table lamps, cutting boards, coffee tables. Every piece is one of a kind, cut from material the workshop sources itself rather than buys pre-milled. That "every piece is unique" reality is exactly what makes a catalog hard to build well. Numbered products (Дерево Бонсай №231, №230, №239 — literally numbered, because each one really is different), multiple categories with their own filtering logic, a blog, an FAQ, a business page for wholesale inquiries — this isn't a five-product storefront template. I took the project on as the client's developer and designer, and I've stayed on since launch as the person responsible for the site.
The build.
Stack: Payload CMS on Next.js, PostgreSQL as the database. The workshop needed to manage a constantly-changing catalog — new pieces added, sold-out ones archived — without depending on a developer for routine updates. Catalog structure: six live categories (bonsai, clocks, lights, boards, coffee tables) plus an archive for discontinued pieces, filterable by price and size. Product pages carry dimensions, material, and price individually — no shared template pretending the pieces are interchangeable. Content beyond the store: a blog publishing on a real schedule — gift-guide and care-instruction posts that double as SEO content, not filler. An FAQ page covering the questions that come up before a purchase decision, not after.
SEO, AEO, and GEO — set up together, not as an afterthought.
Three overlapping layers of search visibility:
SEO
The fundamentals most sites skip: geo-tagged metadata for Yekaterinburg, keyword-targeted category pages, structured product data.
AEO (answer engine optimization)
Content structured so AI-driven search and answer engines can extract it cleanly. The FAQ format specifically supports this: direct question, direct answer, no fluff burying the useful part.
GEO (generative engine optimization)
The same principle extended to how AI tools summarize the business when someone asks them for a recommendation. Clear, factual copy about materials, process, and location is what makes a brand quotable rather than skipped.
What the numbers say.
~600 visitors a month. ~50 orders a month — a strong conversion rate for handmade pieces where the average order isn't an impulse buy. Reviews on Avito, the platform where the business also sells, back up what the numbers suggest: repeat mentions of packaging quality, material authenticity, and delivery reliability across the storefront's customer base.
What's included, ongoing.
Support — four months in, this is still active. Catalog updates as new pieces are made and old ones sell out, fixes, and technical maintenance on the Payload/Next.js stack. SEO/AEO/GEO monitoring — search visibility isn't a one-time setup; it gets checked and adjusted as content grows.
What made this project different.
Most catalog sites are built once around a fixed product list. This one had to be built around constant change — new one-of-a-kind pieces replacing sold-out ones, an archive that keeps history without cluttering the live catalog, and content (blog, FAQ) that needed to grow alongside the product list rather than sit static next to it.