Merchants were hiding payment methods by writing custom Liquid hacks. We built Craft so they don't have to. Here's the full story.
Craft started from a repeated support pattern: merchants wanted conditional checkout behavior, but most solutions were brittle Liquid hacks or expensive one-off custom apps. The gap was obvious: teams needed a reliable rules engine made for real operators, not just developers.
The core pain we saw Merchants were trying to: - Hide payment methods based on cart value or product mix - Enforce shipping/payment combinations with business constraints - Adjust checkout behavior without editing fragile theme logic
What they had was scattered scripts and manual workarounds. What they needed was controlled, auditable rules.
Product hypothesis If we gave merchants a clean interface to define checkout rules and executed those rules through Shopify-native mechanisms, they could move faster and reduce checkout errors without custom development for every change.
That hypothesis shaped the product: - Rule builder designed for operators - Safe defaults to avoid risky configurations - Strong preview/testing before publish - Shopify-first implementation for reliability
How we built it We combined: - Embedded admin UI for configuration - Structured rule definitions stored as normalized data - Shopify Function runtime for deterministic checkout execution - Analytics hooks to monitor rule impact post-deploy
The architecture let us keep execution fast while still giving merchants flexibility.
What changed for merchants After rollout, teams that previously depended on engineering for every checkout tweak could ship rule updates in minutes. Support volume related to checkout inconsistencies dropped, and ops teams gained confidence because rule intent became visible and reviewable.
Product lessons from launch 1. Constraint-based UX beats “infinite flexibility.” Guardrails improve outcomes. 2. Visibility is a feature. Merchants need to see what rule fired and why. 3. Performance cannot be an afterthought in checkout systems. 4. Documentation and onboarding are part of the product, not separate tasks.
Why Craft exists Craft is not a feature bundle. It is a response to a very practical gap in the Shopify App Store: reliable checkout rule control for teams that need speed and operational clarity.
We built it because the same problem kept showing up in client work, and the right product did not exist. Now it does.
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