Arun Silver
A wholesale catalogue with no prices and no cart.
The problem
A Jaipur wholesaler of 925 sterling silver beads had hundreds of designs and no way to show them. Sterling is priced against the day’s metal rate, so any catalogue with prices printed on it is wrong by the afternoon — and trade buyers order by SKU, weight and quantity, not by adding one thing to a cart. Half the buyers read Hindi more comfortably than English.
What it does
A bilingual wholesale catalogue for a Jaipur supplier of 925 sterling silver — 262 designs across Bali beads and simple beads, each with a generated SKU, its exact weight and size, watermarked imagery, search and filtering. Live on the client’s own domain.
Because metal prices move daily, nothing carries a price. Buyers assemble an inquiry list and hand it to the client on WhatsApp, with a live silver spot rate on the page to price against.
Why it is built this way
A catalogue with no prices at all. Buyers build an inquiry list held in local storage — no login, no account — and send it to the client over WhatsApp or email, prefilled with SKUs and quantities. Every design carries its exact weight and size instead, because that is what a wholesale order is actually quoted against. The whole interface runs bilingual English and Hindi off a single translation table. A small PHP endpoint serves the live silver spot rate so buyers can do their own maths, cached server-side for thirty minutes and falling back to the last good value rather than breaking the page when the upstream feed fails.
What was hard
The client previewed the site by opening the folder from their desktop, where there is no server and fetch() cannot read a JSON file. The build script writes the catalogue twice — products.json for the deployed site and products.js as a plain script global — so the same pages work from a file:// URL. The hero image took several attempts too: tiled thumbnail grids read as boxes of separate photos, and a hand-composited flat-lay looked amateurish. What worked was generating a real studio flat-lay from a text brief, then cropping and darkening it for text contrast.
Outcomes
- 262 designs live
- English + Hindi
- Live silver rate