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.

It also had to earn trust without inventing it: no fake testimonials, no photos of pieces that don't exist 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.
• Honesty as positioning. 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.

No framework, one source of truth.

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 this page doesn't claim. There are no visit, order or revenue figures here: the site deliberately runs no analytics, and online payment is not switched on yet. Product visuals on the shop are AI-generated and labelled as such on the site.

Screens from the actual site.