Case studyPoster & Art
A Shopify store that wanted to become a creator economy
Poster & Art sold printed artwork through Shopify. The bigger opportunity was a platform where artists upload their own work and earn from it. Shopify has no native concept of an artist, commission ownership, or a revenue-share payout. so that platform had to be built beside it.
- Services
- Product design & full-stack engineering
- Category
- Creator marketplace platform
- Client
- Poster & Art
- Stack
- Next.js · NestJS · MongoDB · Shopify API · GraphQL
The problem
No infrastructure for artists or commissions.
They wanted to onboard artists, track commission, and scale content. None of those had a system behind them.
- No commission tracking of any kind
- Approvals and publishing dependent on a person
- No link between artist content and Shopify sales
- Artist onboarding effectively impossible at volume
- No way for artists to upload or manage their own work
- Two branded storefronts run as two separate jobs
What it was costing
- Revenue from creator content left on the table
- Manual review capping how much artwork could go live
- Payout disputes with no auditable record behind them
- The brand staying just another Shopify store
Our approach
Build the platform layer, don't stretch Shopify
A separate platform that owns artists, artwork, approval, and money. and treats Shopify as the storefront it is good at being.
- Artist accounts with their own upload and management surface
- Print-readiness checks before artwork reaches production
- Structured admin approval queue with rejection reasons
- Order sync from Shopify into our own order and transaction model
- Commission calculated per sale, per artist, automatically
- Third-party artwork supply integrated to scale the catalogue
Core capabilities
What it does now
Submission, approval, sale, and payout as one pipeline across two brands.
- Artist onboarding and self-serve artwork upload
- Automated print-readiness validation
- Admin approval queue with an audit trail
- Shopify product and order synchronisation
- Revenue share calculated, not reconciled by hand
- Payout protection against refunded and charged-back orders
Every month you leave it manual, you pay for it in salary.
Bring us the workflow that costs you most. Thirty minutes with an engineer, and you leave with the map whether you hire us or not.
Book a systems audit