Lumen Living

A furniture retailer moved off a marketplace onto its own storefront and stopped paying 18% of every sale to somebody else.

Year: 2025
Location: Johannesburg
Duration: 8 weeks

Client: Lumen Living
Role: Store design, Front-end build, Payments integration
Discipline: Web & Digital
Delivered: 2025 · 8 weeks

The problem

What we were actually solving

Lumen Living sold well on a large local marketplace and hated every part of it: an 18% commission, no customer data, no control over how the pieces were photographed or described, and a checkout that had their competitors' products in the sidebar.

The approach

Open plan lounge with a low travertine table and large canvas artwork

How the work was made

The store is built as a headless Next.js front end on a Shopify back end, which gives them the admin tooling their team already understood and none of the theme performance penalty. Product pages load in under a second on a mid-range Android phone on 4G, which is what their customers actually use.

Catalogue structure came before anything visual. Furniture is browsed by room, by material and by lead time, and the previous marketplace listing forced everything into one flat category. We built filters around the three questions the sales team said customers always ask.

Payfast and a courier rate integration handle checkout, with delivery quoted live by suburb rather than estimated and argued about afterwards. Abandoned-cart and delivery-status emails were written as part of the build rather than left as a switch to flip later.

The outcome

Direct sales overtook marketplace sales in the fifth month. Commission savings covered the build cost inside two quarters.

Commission, down from 18% per sale: 0%Commission, down from 18% per sale
Largest Contentful Paint on 4G: 0.9sLargest Contentful Paint on 4G
Average order value versus the marketplace: +34%Average order value versus the marketplace
Quarters to pay back the build: 2Quarters to pay back the build