Les Mailles de Mon Moulin
A complete online shop for a knitting pattern designer: physical and digital products, online courses, and an entire admin area tailored to her craft.
Where it started
One craftswoman, four businesses in one. Marie-Madeleine's business covers printed knitting patterns shipped by post, small-batch handmade pieces, PDF ebooks and online video courses. Four different selling models (stock, shipping, downloads, course access) that mainstream platforms force you to patch together with a pile of plugins and subscriptions.
We made the opposite choice: build everything around her. One site, one cart, one checkout. A customer orders a printed pattern and an ebook in the same cart: the pattern ships by post, the ebook lands by email with a secure download link. Automatically, without Marie-Madeleine lifting a finger.
The site follows the pace of her catalogue: today the storefront features patterns and ebooks. Courses and handmade pieces are ready in the admin, and their section shows up in the menu on its own as soon as a first product is published. No empty pages, nothing to rewire.
And because a shop is much more than its storefront, most of the work went into the back office: an entire admin area, written for her.
What the shop can sell
- Printed knitting patterns shipped by post, with stock and restock alerts
- Handmade pieces with variants (sizes, colours) and per-variant stock
- PDF ebooks delivered through secure, limited-use download links
- Online courses with modules, lessons, and resume-where-you-left-off
Customer side: a complete shop
Everything you expect from a real online shop, without the "powered by" in the footer.
One-screen checkout
Contact details, delivery and card on the same page: card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, promo codes, shipping costs computed from the actual weight and the destination country. Plus a field to leave a note for Marie-Madeleine.
Automatic delivery
Digital products delivered by email the second payment clears, parcel tracking with a progress timeline. Item sold out? Visitors leave their email and hear back as soon as it is restocked.
Customer area
Order history, ebook re-downloads, course access, favourites, reviews, profile: every customer finds everything in one place.
Online courses
A real course area: modules, lessons, saved progress. A full training platform, built into the shop.
Reviews, blog, Instagram
Reviews reserved for actual buyers (with an email reminder a few days after shipping), a blog with moderated comments, an automatic Instagram feed. The storefront stays alive effortlessly.
A home-made link page
Her Instagram link page, on her own site: sortable links, click stats, live mobile preview. One less subscription.
A pattern page: level, techniques you will learn, companion videos, needles, yarn, sizes. The vocabulary of knitting, not of software.
The Instagram link page, hosted on her own site.
A customer area that gathers everything
Shipped pattern, handmade piece, ebook, course: the "All" tab gathers the four kinds of purchases, each with the action that matters. Parcels are tracked step by step, ebooks re-download (with a counter), courses resume where they left off.
Favourite products and reviews have their own page. Even withdrawal requests are self-service, no email to write.
Behind the scenes: a control room
It's the part you never see in portfolios, yet it's where Marie-Madeleine spends her time. Every screen below was designed and built specifically for her business. Real screenshots of the interface (demo data).
Every morning, the site says what to do
The dashboard opens on a "To do today" list: orders to ship, reviews to moderate, Instagram to reconnect, a page missing from Google for too long. Then monthly revenue, latest sales, sold-out products customers are waiting for, and mini-CRM reminders.
A "system health" section watches the technical side (email quotas, photo and PDF storage) to warn before anything breaks.
Orders in a guided queue
Orders land in a processing queue: one-click address copy, a "Ship" button that sends the tracking number to the customer, one-click refunds with a confirmation dialog. The note left by the customer at checkout shows up first, before the item list: you read it before packing.
Digital sales (ebooks, courses) are listed too. Search, status filters, CSV export for bookkeeping.
Every customer, known by heart
Click a name and her panel opens: full history (orders, ebooks, courses), total spent, average basket, favourite products. With custom tags, private notes and reminders that surface on the dashboard.
Everything saves automatically, no button. A real little CRM, with no extra software.
Home-built, cookie-free analytics GDPR
Visitors, page views, devices, sources, how far people scroll on the homepage: bespoke audience measurement, anonymous and cookie-free. A funnel also shows at which checkout step customers drop off.
For her posts, a generator builds tracked links: the visits they bring in show up under "Your campaigns". 100% of visits counted, no consent banner needed for these stats, no third-party subscription.
Edit the page… on the page
No dreary forms: Marie-Madeleine writes directly inside a faithful preview of her product page. Title, description, price, photos: everything edits in place and saves automatically.
Next to it, the business settings: printed stock, restock alert threshold, weight for shipping costs. When stock goes back above zero, customers waiting for the pattern get an email.
The whole site edits… by clicking on it
The real site shows up inside the editor; every outlined text edits in place, saves automatically, and the public site updates within seconds.
Homepage, link page, "My story", contact, blog, legal pages: it all goes through here. Dedicated modes for colours, fonts, sections and SEO, plus a schedulable announcement bar (holidays, new release, offer) that switches itself on and off on the chosen dates.
A built-in knitting school
Marie-Madeleine wanted to sell online courses without subscribing to yet another platform. Her admin builds the course module by module, lesson by lesson (videos, PDFs, free preview) with a pre-publish checklist.
Buyers, revenue, completion rate: everything tracked in one place. And every customer resumes right where she stopped.
Promotions in two clicks
An assistant offers ready-made occasions (win-back, welcome, flash sale) or free settings: percentage or fixed amount, scope (whole site or a single category), usage limit, expiry date. The code works immediately at checkout.
Wired to the payment system, usage counters update on their own.
Pre-chewed tax declarations
Every month or quarter, the site computes the revenue to declare from actual payments, already split as the official form requires (patterns and handmade pieces as goods, ebooks and courses as services), with estimated contributions.
Two "Copy this amount" buttons, a direct link to the official portal, a declaration history and progress towards the yearly thresholds. The chore becomes a copy-paste.
Every email, in her words
Order confirmation, shipping, review reminder, reply to a blog comment… every automatic email is laid out along the customer journey, and each one customises and test-sends in one click.
Even machine-generated messages speak with her voice.
And that's not all: shipping methods and rates by country, moderation of reviews and blog comments, blog writing, Instagram feed, Google search monitoring (clicks, positions, page-by-page indexing), gifting a product without going through checkout, two-factor authentication, built-in help page… every corner of the business has its screen.
Everything under one roof
No tool lasagne, no stacking subscriptions: one site, designed as a whole, and respectful of its visitors.
One site that replaces everything
- A complete online shop, physical and digital
- A course platform with progress tracking
- An Instagram link page, with its own stats
- Privacy-friendly audience measurement
- A mini-CRM and a tax declaration assistant
- Google search monitoring, without leaving her admin
Compliance & sobriety
- Anonymous, cookie-free stats, exempt from consent requirements
- A consent banner only for external audience measurement
- Self-service account and data deletion for customers
- Fast pages: server-side rendering, right-sized images
What if it had been done "the usual way"?
Turnkey platforms are perfectly fine, and that's not the point. The point is what you own at the end, and what you pay every month just to keep existing.
The classic stack
Covering the same ground with off-the-shelf tools would have meant assembling:
- A turnkey online shop, plus a premium theme
- A subscription-based course platform
- A paid service for the Instagram link page
- Extensions for reviews, statistics, the announcement bar…
- Dozens of euros in subscriptions every month, forever, and a generic interface designed for "everyone", meaning no one
The Obrentis way
One site, built for her craft:
- Shop, courses, link page, stats, search monitoring: everything is integrated
- An admin area in her language, in the vocabulary of knitting
- Features no platform offers, like the tax helper or the mini-CRM
- No third-party module subscriptions
- She owns the code and the data: she can leave, host elsewhere, keep evolving: nothing is locked in
a project in mind?
Describe your need in one sentence. I'll tell you if it's doable, and what it costs.