E-commerce
Electonyx
An Astro-built Arduino and ESP32 kit storefront for Sri Lankan makers, with a custom kit configurator, WhatsApp ordering and trilingual tutorials.
- Client
- Electonyx
- Year
- 2025
- Role
- Web design & Astro build
- Location
- Sri Lanka
- Services
- Astro, React, TypeScript, WhatsApp API, Custom Kit Configurator
Overview
Electonyx is a Sri Lankan electronics-education brand selling Arduino and ESP32 learning kits to students, hobbyists and parents. Every kit comes with lifetime access to a tutorial library, and each video is recorded in English, Tamil and Sinhala.
The challenge
The market needed a locally designed kit with local pricing, local languages and an ordering flow that runs on WhatsApp. The storefront had three fixed kit tiers, a tutorial library and a configurator. It had to be fast on a student's phone over 4G and work on older school laptops, without monthly SaaS fees eating into the margin on each unit.
Approach
We chose Astro instead of Shopify.
- Static by default: the marketing pages ship around 20 KB of JS on first load.
- Server-rendered checkout talking directly to a Notion-backed orders database and the WhatsApp Business API, with no platform cut on each sale.
- MDX tutorial index, so the founder can add a project by writing a Markdown file.
- Low running cost: the store runs on a $6/month VPS.
We built cart, inventory and checkout ourselves. That made sense here because the catalog is small and stable.
What we built:
- A dark storefront with a safety-orange accent, using React islands only where interactivity was needed.
- Three kit tiers (Beginner, Intermediate and an AI-focused Advanced), each with its own detail page.
- A custom kit configurator at /customize. Customers swap components, see the price update live, and send the configured spec as a pre-filled WhatsApp message.
- English, Tamil and Sinhala switching wherever tutorials are referenced.
- A WhatsApp option next to every CTA.
- Core Web Vitals tuning: AVIF images with WebP fallback, and islands that hydrate only when scrolled into view.
We didn't write the tutorials, source the components or build an LMS. Those stayed with the founder.
Outcome
The live store scores Lighthouse 98+ on mobile. It sells three kit tiers covering 16 guided projects, with tutorials in three languages and island-wide dispatch within a day.
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