Slingshot Bio makes synthetic cell mimics: engineered particles that stand in for real T, B, and NK cells on any flow cytometer and hold steady where donor samples drift from batch to batch. By the time they reached us they had outgrown their setup, a WordPress marketing site on one domain and a separate Shopify store on another, with no shared design, content model, or data between them. We were brought in to converge the two into a single headless platform, design through to launch in three months.
We built on turbo-start-shopify, our open-source Shopify and Sanity starter. Sanity owns the content, Shopify is reduced to checkout, and Next.js on Vercel keeps the full catalogue filtering instantly as families and markers are added. A scientific catalogue is unusually structured, so we modelled every control as data rather than a hand-built page: markers, reactivity, pack sizes, application notes, and a certificate of analysis all render from one source, and the team can publish a new product or COA without a developer.
We instrumented the whole path in PostHog and stitched identity across the headless boundary, so we can follow one session from the first landing page through to a completed Shopify checkout even though checkout runs on a separate domain. Session replay sits on top, so the team can watch real researchers move through the site and see where a high-value order stalls or closes.
We also built for how labs actually buy. Most controls sell through a mix of cart and enquiry, and a purchase usually needs sign-off, so a researcher can turn a basket into an itemised, branded PDF and send it to a principal investigator or procurement to approve. The cart holds for weeks so they can return and check out once approval lands. We replaced the native Shopify basket with a headless cart on Next.js that updates optimistically, the line items and total moving at once while the Storefront and Cart APIs confirm in the background, so it reads as markedly faster than native Shopify.
The cutover was clean. We inventoried every page and resource across both old sites, mapped each to its new home, and shipped a custom Shopify theme whose only job is redirects, so nothing broke and the search equity carried across. The platform launched AI-ready: JSON-LD on every product, collection, and resource, content negotiation that serves clean Markdown to AI crawlers alongside the HTML, an llms.txt, and a sitemap whose timestamps track Sanity directly. Marketing publishes in Sanity, and the structured data, the sitemap, and the crawlable Markdown all stay current on their own.
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