YEM’S

A new brand, no reviews, and no card payments yet.

Yem's is a young house with its own atelier in Cotonou and a curated line of shoes chosen elsewhere. The site had to sell to a man who cares how he looks at work, in a market where most people pay on delivery or by Mobile Money, and before the business had a merchant account.

And it had to earn people's trust without faking anything: no made-up reviews, no photos of shoes that hadn't been made yet.

Order now, pay later. Price on the server.

• No payment at checkout. The order is saved, the atelier is notified on WhatsApp and calls the customer back. Payment happens on delivery or by Mobile Money. Bespoke pieces need a 50% deposit, because the leather is bought first.
• The cart says what, never how much. Every price is recalculated on the server from the catalogue, so a tampered cart can't change an amount.
• Being upfront. Pieces that can't be photographed yet sit behind an announcement page instead of empty cards. Early fake reviews were replaced by « Personne ne nous a encore recommandés » and three ways to check the atelier yourself.
• Online payment ready, but off. Card and Mobile Money payment through KkiaPay is implemented and verified server-side, and stays switched off until a merchant account exists.

Built by hand, from one catalogue file.

The catalogue lives in a single JSON file. A Python generator writes 23 static pages from it: product pages, categories, sitemap and structured data. A Cloudflare Worker handles orders, the admin API and live catalogue edits, which are applied to the pages at the edge without a rebuild.

• Bespoke configurator: shape, leather, thread, sole, size and initials, with an itemised price that updates live
• Admin for the atelier: order statuses, WhatsApp links, catalogue overrides and data anonymisation
• Responsive images (WebP, srcset), non-blocking fonts and immutable caching
• Accessibility: skip link, visible focus, reduced motion, and a contrast checker that runs through the CSS cascade
• A security pass: content security policy, CSRF and brute-force protection, data minimisation

The stack.

Front end

Hand-written HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript

Generator

Python, standard library only

Server

Cloudflare Workers with static assets

Database

PostgreSQL through Cloudflare Hyperdrive

Integrations

WhatsApp Cloud API, KkiaPay (implemented, switched off)

What exists today.

The site is live at maisonyems.com: a complete, documented e-commerce site with 23 generated pages, a working configurator, an ordering flow, an admin, legal pages, and a step-by-step deployment guide written for the owner.

What I can't show you. I don't have visit or sales figures to share: the site runs no analytics, on purpose, and online payment isn't switched on yet. The product photos on the shop are AI-generated, and the site says so.

Screens from the actual site.