1689 Armory

A body-armour retailer on hosted e-commerce, in a category that payment processors and platforms restrict or remove without much notice. Every transaction carried a platform fee, and the entire storefront sat on infrastructure the business did not control and could lose. Migrating off it normally means surrendering years of accumulated search equity.

The migration risk is not the storefront, it is the URLs. Rebuild the commerce layer however you like, but if the collection and product paths change, the business pays for its independence in lost rankings. So the new application preserves the old platform’s URL structure exactly — the addresses survive, the infrastructure underneath them does not.

The site should look like the product it sells. Black grounds, coyote and camo accents, heavy sans headers over full-bleed product and field photography. Products are shot flat and consistent against a plain ground so the grid reads as a rack rather than a carousel. Restraint in a category that usually shouts.

A custom commerce application: catalog and collections, cart, customer accounts and authentication, a wishlist, checkout, and an authenticated admin surface. No hosted-commerce scripts remain in the markup — the entire transaction path is owned.

The build also ships an llms.txt and an explicit AI-crawler allowlist in robots.txt covering the major answer engines. That is a deliberate bet that a meaningful share of future product discovery happens inside an assistant’s answer rather than a results page, and that a restricted category should be legible to those systems on its own terms.