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Wine River

A Craft Wine Shop, Built and Operated by the Studio

wineriver.shop
Wine River storefront — the live craft wine shop with its barrel hero, brand header, and catalogue navigation
The live Wine River storefront — catalogue, basket, and checkout, running in production.

Wine River is a live direct-to-consumer craft wine shop the studio built and operates: catalogue, product pages, basket, checkout, hosting, and deployment. It shows the studio can ship and maintain production e-commerce, not just design the front door.

The Problem

What makes a shop hard is not the homepage — it is everything behind it. A working catalogue of real products. A basket and checkout that have to stay correct. Customer accounts and the orders they place. And the upkeep — updates, fixes, uptime — that keeps all of it running long after launch. Wine River is the studio carrying that weight on a shop of its own: operational commerce, real product data, an order path that has to hold up, maintained rather than handed off.

The Solution

Not everything should be bespoke. Wine River runs on PrestaShop — a deliberate off-the-shelf choice. For a focused wine shop a proven commerce platform is the right tool, and a ground-up build like the Hostettler engagement would not have been the right trade-off here.

The studio made it Wine River’s own with a custom child theme and home module, containerised the stack, deployed it to AWS, and operates it there. The value is the judgement: knowing what to build, what to adapt, and what to leave alone.

What’s Running in Production

Catalogue & Product PagesBrowsable range of craft wines with per-bottle product pages, pricing, and categories.
Basket & CheckoutFrom basket to multi-step checkout — the full purchase path, not a contact form.
Accounts & Order HistoryRegistered customers can sign in, save their details, and view their order history.
Store AdminA staff back office for managing the catalogue, processing orders, and handling customers.
Delivery & FulfilmentBuilt to ship bottles to customers, not just list them — delivery is part of the model, not a bolt-on.
Search & FilteringCatalogue search so customers can find a specific bottle rather than scroll the whole range.

Technologies

PrestaShop
Symfony
PHP
MariaDB
Nginx
Docker
Amazon EC2

Architecture Highlights

Custom Theme & Module
Branding lives in a child theme and a home module — PrestaShop’s standard, upgrade-safe customisation path. The shop reads as Wine River without forking the platform or carrying a bespoke storefront to maintain.
Containerised Stack
MariaDB, PHP-FPM, and nginx run as Docker services, so the shop behaves the same on a laptop as it does in production.
Infrastructure as Code on AWS
CloudFormation provisions the Elastic IP and web server, so the deployment is reproducible rather than hand-configured — the same cloud discipline the studio brings to client engagements.
Operated & Maintained
The shop is run, not just shipped: the studio pushes updates and keeps it patched, while the catalogue and every order persist in the MariaDB data layer behind it.

See it Running

Wine River is live and public at wineriver.shop. You can verify the claim yourself: browse the catalogue, add a bottle to the basket, and see it working.

Visit the shop
Talk to us about an online shop like this