lovesido
ai-powered digital gift platform.
lovesido is basically a boutique digital gift shop. i built a flexible ordering system that lets customers answer some questions about the gift, making every request feel personal. it’s possible to add custom fields/questions to products, so the system can be used for different types of digital gifts.
i don’t like “prompt and forget”. so every order is a human-ai collab. quality is guaranteed thanks to human touch.
that means i don’t use ai to create the final gift, but to speed up the process. ai is a tool, and like any tool, it’s about how you use it.
the stack
i used next.js to build the site becuase it’s very easy to deploy and i think it will help people find us on google. for the data, i used convex. not because it’s better than supabase, just because i wanted to try it. did i regret it? no, it’s pretty cool and works well.
the whole project uses typescript even though i’m not a big fan of it. if you wonder why, i wrote about it here.
for the design, tailwind css keeps everything looking clean on both phones and desktops. but as you can see it doesn’t look like a typical tailwind project thanks to grainy images and backgrounds. i aimed for a less “techy” look and i think i achieved it.
challenges
honestly, i did not have any big technical problems. everything worked well. the real challenge was where i live :)
to take credit card payments in turkey, you need a virtual POS. and to get a virtual POS, you must have a company. and if you start a company, you have to pay monthly taxes and fees. you have to pay even if you have no sales.
actually merchant of record services like polar.sh can solve this problem for you. they handle payments and taxes for you and you can start without a company. i used it before and it’s great. but they dont support turkish lira… this is actually not a problem, i can still get payments but it will create a huge friction for local customers and sales will drop. anyway, still working on it.