# A direct-to-consumer store we built, own, and run

**Client**: ANVIL Floor Systems (an Anvil business). **Sector**: Ecommerce, direct-to-consumer. **Year**: 2026.

anvilfloors.com sells industrial-grade garage floor coating kits direct to homeowners across the US. Customers photograph their garage, see real finishes on their own floor, and buy a kit sized to their slab. The whole store, cart to back office, is software Anvil wrote and operates.

## The problem

A garage floor coating is a considered purchase with one question behind it: what will it look like on my floor? Off-the-shelf storefronts answer with a swatch grid and a cart, and the kit sizing, overage, freight and safety paperwork that make the product deliverable are bolted on as plugins that stop agreeing with each other. We wanted a store that answered the real question and priced the real kit, and we did not want to pay a platform a percentage of every sale for the privilege.

## How we approached it

We built the store the way we build for clients: the buying flow first, the engine underneath it second. The flow is three steps a homeowner already understands: upload a photo, try the finishes, build the kit. Underneath, nothing is looked up. A kit is arithmetic over coverage rates and film build, so any floor size prices correctly and the cart discloses exactly what arrives in the box. Because we run it ourselves, every rough edge a customer feels is one we feel first.

## What we built

- **The visualizer**: One photo from a phone, no app, no account. Real finish blends rendered onto the customer’s own garage, side by side, before they buy.
- **Kits priced from the slab**: Dimensions in, a sized kit out, overage included, everything needed in one shipment. Pricing is computed from coverage, never maintained in a matrix.
- **Our own commerce engine**: Cart, checkout, tax, payments, order records, fulfilment state, documents and the back office, written by Anvil on WordPress. No WooCommerce, no per-sale platform fee.
- **Built to be found and to stay fast**: Per-page performance budgets enforced at build time, structured data, and a plain-text install guide customers can hand to an AI assistant. Hosted and operated by us.

## Result

anvilfloors.com is the proof behind our ecommerce work: a store that sells a considered product to homeowners nationwide, on an engine we own end to end, with no platform taking a cut. It runs every day on the same discipline we bring to client builds, and it brought us our next ecommerce client.

- A three-step buying flow that shows a customer their own garage finished before they spend a dollar, which is the question every floor-coating buyer actually has.
- Kit pricing that is correct at any floor size because it is computed from coverage and film build, with the cart disclosing exactly what ships.
- A complete commerce engine, cart to back office, owned outright, so the store scales without a platform fee growing with it.
- Operated by Anvil in production: hosting, monitoring, backups, deliverability and search visibility handled, which is the same package a client store gets.

**Capabilities used**: Direct-to-consumer storefront, Custom commerce engine, Image pipeline and visualizer, Configured pricing, Production operations.