Chonggak Hanwoo — D2C Commerce

The problem

A hanwoo (Korean beef) seller wanted to go direct-to-consumer, but a real D2C operation means payments, inventory, orders, delivery, and customer notifications — usually a whole team's worth of tooling. The business had none of it and no engineering staff.

Goal & constraints

Independently ship a production-ready storefront plus the back-office tooling a non-technical owner could operate day to day, without a team.

Key decisions

• Integrate Toss Payments and Kakao AlimTalk instead of rolling custom payment/notification flows.

  In the Korean market these are the rails customers already trust. Leaning on them cut compliance and delivery-notification risk and freed engineering time for the parts that were actually differentiated.

• Build a custom admin dashboard rather than use an off-the-shelf commerce backend.

  Inventory, orders, and delivery were tightly coupled to how this specific business worked. A tailored dashboard let the owner run operations without me in the loop.

• Add Redis and CDN caching on top of Prisma/RDS.

  Storefront reads dominated traffic. Caching them kept the site fast and the database cheap under launch-day load.

How I built it

Outcome

The store launched and generated over ₩7.5M in revenue in its first month — validating both the product and the operability of the ops tooling.

What I took away

• Choosing boring, trusted infrastructure for payments freed my budget of attention for what made the business unique.
• The admin dashboard mattered as much as the storefront — shipping software someone else can operate is a different bar than shipping a demo.