/ Shopify store build
Tampa Sauna Builders
A new Shopify store for a Florida sauna company: nineteen brands, products from a bucket and ladle to a cabin over $40,000, and shipping, delivery area and quote rules that work the way the business does.
- Client
- Tampa Sauna Builders, Tampa, Florida
- Platform
- Shopify, Horizon
- Type of work
- Store build
- Year
- 2026
The problem
Tampa Sauna Builders supply and install saunas across Tampa Bay. They wanted a proper online store to sit alongside the installation business: indoor and outdoor saunas, heaters, cold plunges, steam showers and building materials, from nineteen brands including SaunaLife, HUUM, Harvia and Thermory.
The look was the easy part. The hard part was that the products do not behave alike. A thermometer ships in a box. A hot tub ships on a truck. An outdoor cabin needs a flatbed. Some builds are too custom to sell with an Add to cart button at all, and they only deliver to the lower 48 states. A stock theme with one flat shipping rate would have got most orders wrong. On top of that the team is split between Tampa and Portugal, and they were loading the catalogue themselves while I built the store around it.
What I built
I designed the homepage, collection and product pages first, kept to their colours and voice, and built them on Shopify’s Horizon theme once they were signed off. On top of Horizon I added custom blocks for the parts a stock theme does not have: hero banners, spec tables grouped by type, process steps, brand tiles, breadcrumbs and local business schema so Google reads them as a Tampa company. A mega menu puts every category and all nineteen brands within three clicks.
The catalogue structure came before the catalogue. I set up the product fields and spec groups, then exported a sample product so the team’s own import script had the exact columns to fill. They loaded 235 products in an afternoon, without me touching a spreadsheet.
Shipping is set per product. Each product carries a tag for how it travels: parcel, LTL freight, flatbed, tub, door, window or heater. The tag places it in a hidden collection that carries its own rate, so the cart works out the right charge on its own and the product page tells the customer up front how it ships. Small parcels ship free over a set order value.
Halfway through the build Shopify moved shipping into Markets and took away the option to untick Alaska and Hawaii. Reverting to the old setup or paying for an app were both on the table. Instead I put Alaska, Hawaii and the US territories in their own market with shipping switched off, and tested it against real addresses in each. An order to those addresses is stopped before payment, and everywhere else ships as normal.
Custom and made to order products carry a quote only tag. On those, Add to cart is swapped for a Get a quote button that opens the quote form with the product and SKU already filled in. The quote and contact forms post straight into the client’s own CRM, so enquiries land where the team already works.
Checkout and all of the customer emails were branded to match the store, from order confirmation to shipping updates. The team asked for a spreadsheet with every order, which would have meant another app. The staff order email already carried most of it, so I added the brand to every line and widened the layout, and each order now arrives with part number, brand and quantity in one view.
To keep a team across two time zones moving, I ran the launch from a shared go live checklist and set up visual feedback on the store, so they could pin a note to any part of a page instead of describing it in a message. I placed test orders on iPhone, Android and iPad, mapped the old site’s pages to their new homes, and transferred the store to their account.
The outcome
Live on 29 October 2026 at tampasaunabuilders.com, six weeks after the first call. The first web enquiry came in the next day. One store carrying nineteen brands, freight charged correctly per product, deliveries held to the lower 48, and custom builds routed to a quote instead of a checkout, with no shipping app.
Changes since launch go through a separate development theme, so the live store only moves when the team signs off. The next piece is a Complete your sauna block: each sauna lists the heater, controls and stones it needs, and the customer adds them with one button. It started in the cart, and I moved it to the product page, so a buyer sees everything the sauna needs before they decide rather than finding out at the cart.
What the client said
“This looks really good! I like how you’ve kept it consistent from the original site with the colors and the copy.”