The retail site is 100% custom code built in Crystal (server) and Svelte (client). The only part that isn't running my own code is our checkout flow -- I let Shopify handle everything after "Add to Cart".
Our system backend is a separate Crystal app which handles inventory management, pricing research, and price prediction. I've developed an ML model to do price prediction and it kinda works?
What I'm actually working on: This is my full-time gig and probably 60% of my time is spent running the business (going to coin shows, buying coins, photographing new purchases, etc.) and 40% is spent writing code to make the 60% run more efficiently :). It seems I have an infinite list of things to do -- improvements to our retail site; Improvements in how to efficiently go from coin to retail listing (turns out you can send just photos of coins to Claude and with the right prompt it will actually give you a reasonably good description that doesn't sound toooooo AI slop-y); Next "big" project is adapting our ML model for paper currency. The taxonomy is similar but not the same and there's a whole world of notes out there that need to be priced.
Always happy to talk about this stuff so always feel free to email with any numismatic (or tech-numismatic) questions. noah@rarity7.com.
I've played with Shopify for many years and it just can't do some of the low-level stuff I want it to do without badly mangling how product taxonomy works. Coins are a different kind of beast than typical retail and if I'm going to be writing code anyway, I'd rather write my own code (vs. writing code "on the shopify platform").
The really sensitive stuff - financial stuff - they handle through checkout (and I don't need anything special there), so I've really just written my own catalog & front-end.
https://rarity7.com
The retail site is 100% custom code built in Crystal (server) and Svelte (client). The only part that isn't running my own code is our checkout flow -- I let Shopify handle everything after "Add to Cart".
Our system backend is a separate Crystal app which handles inventory management, pricing research, and price prediction. I've developed an ML model to do price prediction and it kinda works?
What I'm actually working on: This is my full-time gig and probably 60% of my time is spent running the business (going to coin shows, buying coins, photographing new purchases, etc.) and 40% is spent writing code to make the 60% run more efficiently :). It seems I have an infinite list of things to do -- improvements to our retail site; Improvements in how to efficiently go from coin to retail listing (turns out you can send just photos of coins to Claude and with the right prompt it will actually give you a reasonably good description that doesn't sound toooooo AI slop-y); Next "big" project is adapting our ML model for paper currency. The taxonomy is similar but not the same and there's a whole world of notes out there that need to be priced.
Always happy to talk about this stuff so always feel free to email with any numismatic (or tech-numismatic) questions. noah@rarity7.com.