The brief I walked into
The owner had a real following — repeat buyers, an active Facebook community, and word-of-mouth that brought in new customers every week. But every order still went through DMs: someone would screenshot a product, ask the price, send a payment screenshot, and then the team would manually log it in a notebook.
The system worked at small scale. It absolutely did not scale to 200+ orders a week, which is where the brand was heading.
How I attacked it
I built the Shopify store with their existing customers in mind: the language stays informal, product photography keeps the home-kitchen feel, and bKash + Nagad are first-class payment options at checkout (not buried under "other"). Inventory is now actually tracked, so customers see what's in stock before they order.
We kept the Facebook page alive as the primary discovery channel — the goal wasn't to replace it, just to make sure orders that land there could be served without a 12-message back-and-forth. Facebook ads now point to the actual product page; pixel data feeds back into Shopify Audiences for retargeting.
What changed for the business
Monthly sales grew ~30% in the first three months after launch — most of that came from converting people who'd previously bounced off the DM friction. ROAS on Meta Ads sits around 1.5× consistently, and the average review rating across the store stays above 4.8 because the order experience finally matches the product quality.
The team's customer-service load is down, despite serving more orders.