Mike Sanborn
I build Next.js storefronts on Medusa.
The frontend layer specifically: multi-region routing, variant-heavy catalogs, checkout, and performance. I work white-label under agency brands, and directly with brands running their own headless build.
mike@mikesanborn.devWhat an AI agent gets wrong building a Medusa storefront
I built a production storefront with an AI agent doing the implementation and me directing and reviewing it. The speed wasn't the interesting part. The interesting part was that the agent produced the same nine categories of defect every time — configuration that only works locally, silent omissions inside things that look complete, data-model shortcuts that block a feature three weeks later, image files whose extensions lied about their format.
It also handed me a 95 Lighthouse score on the easy route while the page customers actually browse sat at 82, and a 1.3s LCP that turned out to be the best of five samples.
Most teams are building this way now, whether or not it's in the process doc. The review layer is where the risk sits, and almost nobody is writing about it concretely.
Read it →Amber Hour Coffee Co.
A production storefront for a specialty roaster selling into the US and the EU. Built to a real spec rather than a sample-data one.
- Two regions and two currencies across six country-routed storefronts, with region-aware pricing throughout
- Nine buyable variants per product — three grinds by three bag sizes — each with its own SKU and shipping weight
- Volume pricing that ladders by bag size, a category taxonomy, and per-product origin, process, altitude, and roast data
- Images on Cloudflare R2 behind a bound custom domain, WebP, through responsive next/image
- App Router with server-first rendering, deliberate client boundaries, and Suspense on secondary queries
Catalog page, mobile: 95 Lighthouse performance — median of five runs, range 90–98, up from 82. LCP 1.9s, CLS 0, accessibility 100.
Working together
Storefront Sprint — $6,500, two weeks
You have Medusa running and a storefront that still looks like the starter. I take it to branded and production-ready: design system, product and collection pages, cart and checkout, responsive and performance passes, deploy. Fixed scope, fixed date, one round of revisions.
Full Storefront Build — from $18,000
Ground-up storefront. Custom design implementation, multi-region and multi-currency, i18n, search and filtering, accounts and order history, custom checkout, CMS integration, analytics, handoff documentation. Five to eight weeks depending on regions and integrations.
Agency Subcontract — $4,500/week
White-label, under your brand, invoiced weekly. You keep the client relationship. Useful when you've sold a headless build and need a commerce frontend person who's shipped one.
Storefront Audit — $1,500, three days
A written teardown of an existing headless storefront: performance against measured Core Web Vitals, checkout friction, cart and session handling, SEO and metadata, mobile, accessibility. Ends with a prioritized fix list. Credited in full toward any build booked within 30 days.
Not a fit for: backend Medusa architecture, or a small Shopify store that would be worse off replatformed. I'll tell you if that's what you've got.