A custom store for a Portland botanicals shop, built so the content actually sells.
Herb Stomp is a family-owned kratom, kava, and ethnobotanical shop on NE Sandy in Portland, 11 years in, 4.8 stars across 284 Google reviews. They sell products people research before they buy, so we built them a custom ecommerce store where the reading and the buying happen in the same place. The blog merchandises the products it talks about. The product pages keep the buy box on screen the whole way down. Then we started the SEO.
Same shop, same "From the source. To your door." line. Everything else rebuilt from scratch. Click either to enlarge.
The Challenge
Selling botanicals online is harder than selling almost anything else. The products are regulated, so you can't make health claims or talk about dosing without putting your payment processor and your ad accounts at risk. Customers want to actually understand what they're buying, so a bare product grid with a price and an Add to Cart button doesn't cut it. And the whole category is crowded with stores that look like they were built in 2014 on a WooCommerce theme with fifteen plugins bolted on.
Herb Stomp had the hard part figured out already. Eleven years running a real shop in Portland, lab-tested kratom, kava, mushrooms, teas, and ethnobotanicals, same-day shipping, 284 reviews at 4.8 stars. What they didn't have was an online store that carried any of that weight. The kind of customer who reads a full guide on damiana before buying it had nowhere to do that, and nowhere to buy it from once they were convinced.
So this was two problems in one. Build a store that can sell products people need to research, and do it in a way that stays on the right side of the rules that govern this category. Then build the SEO to bring in the people searching for these plants in the first place.
A custom ecommerce store, not a dressed-up theme.
The whole storefront is hand-built on Astro with a headless WooCommerce backend, so the catalog, orders, and inventory run on software Herb Stomp already knows, while the front end is fast, custom, and ours to shape. No page builder, no theme, no plugin sprawl. Category pages have real copy and faceted filters. Product cards carry their variants right on the tile. And the pages load fast on a phone, which is where most of this traffic is.
Category pages that can rank and sell
Take the kratom page. It opens with a real intro on what the product is, how it's tested, and how it ships, the kind of copy a search engine can actually use, then hands you a grid of 16 strains you can filter by vein or narrow to what's on sale. Best sellers like Green Maeng Da, White Maeng Da, and Red Bali sit up top, and every card shows powder and capsule sizing inline, so you're picking a 4 oz bag or an 8 oz without a single extra click. Kava, mushrooms, tea, herbs and spices, and ethnobotanicals each get the same treatment.
Fulfillment and trust, up front
The things that make people click buy on a botanical store are the things that are usually buried: third-party lab testing, ODA and GMP handling, same-day shipping before 3pm Pacific, free shipping over $200, an actual storefront address in Portland. On Herb Stomp those sit at the top of the page and on the product itself, not three scrolls down in a footer nobody reads.
The reading and the buying happen on the same screen.
This is the part we're proudest of, and it's the whole reason the site converts the way it's built to. Most stores treat content and commerce as two separate things: a blog over here, a shop over there, and a customer who has to find their own way from one to the other. Herb Stomp doesn't. The guide and the product are wired together, so the moment someone is interested, the thing they want is already right there.
The blog sells. On purpose.
Herb Stomp has 37 long-form guides, the kind with sources and footnotes, on things like damiana tea, kava, and blue lotus. On a normal store, a guide like that is a dead end. Someone reads 1,500 words, gets interested, and then has to go dig through the nav to find what they just read about. Most of them don't bother.
So we pinned a "Products in this guide" panel next to every article. Read the damiana piece and Damiana Leaf, Wild Dagga, and Kanna are sitting right there with their real prices, one click from the cart. The reader never has to leave the page that just convinced them.
Scroll the whole page. The buy button never leaves.
Same idea on the product pages. Because people research these plants, every product has a full write-up: what it is, where it comes from, how it's sold, storage, a spec table, links to related botanicals. On most stores that pushes the Add to Cart button way down below the fold.
Here the buy box is a sticky column. You can read all the way through the botanical name, the family, the origin, the storage notes, and the price and size selector stay locked to the side the entire time. The product is buyable at every scroll position, not just the top. That is the two-column layout doing real work: the thing you're reading about is always the thing you can put in your cart.
Built to sell regulated products without getting shut down.
Kratom and ethnobotanicals come with rules, and they're not optional. You can't make health claims. You can't talk about how much to take. Ignore that and you lose your payment processor, your ad accounts, or worse. A lot of stores in this space react by stripping their pages down to nothing, which kills the SEO and the sales at the same time.
We built the framing into the system instead. Every product and every guide sells the plant on what it actually is, its history, its botany, how it's sourced and stored, and carries the right disclaimer automatically: educational and research use, no health or therapeutic claims, right there on the page. The content still reads like a shop that knows its stuff wrote it. It just doesn't cross the lines that get botanical stores taken offline.
The store is the foundation. Now we build on it.
We're honest about where this is: the ecommerce SEO program is early. But the hard, structural part is already done, and it's the part most botanical stores never get to. Clean category URLs, product pages with schema and real content, 37 researched guides that each target how people actually search for these plants, breadcrumbs, fast pages, and the guide-to-product wiring that keeps people moving from reading to buying. That's a foundation you can rank on. Now it compounds.
Researched Guides
37Cited long-form, each wired to products
Kratom Strains
16Filterable by vein, all lab-tested
Google Rating
Real reputation to build the SEO on
Product Schema
100%Product, Breadcrumb, and FAQ markup
What the SEO work is doing now
- 1. Keyword research on how people actually shop for kratom, kava, and ethnobotanicals, then mapping it to the category and product pages we already built.
- 2. Expanding the guide library so every product has an article that can rank for the informational searches around it, and pull that reader straight into the store.
- 3. Local search for the Portland shop, so "kratom near me" and the storefront on NE Sandy get found by people who'd rather walk in.
- 4. Technical hygiene: internal linking between guides and products, schema, indexing, and Core Web Vitals kept in the green.
The Technical Edge
Astro front end
A static-first storefront that ships almost no JavaScript by default. Product and category pages load fast on a phone, which is where most botanical shopping happens.
Headless WooCommerce
The catalog, pricing, and inventory live in WooCommerce, so the shop runs on tools the team already knows. The custom front end pulls from it without inheriting the theme bloat.
Blog wired to the store
Guides and products are linked in both directions. Every guide surfaces the products it mentions, and every product links back to the reading that supports it.
Schema on every page
Product, BreadcrumbList, and FAQ structured data so Google understands the catalog, the categories, and the guides without guessing.
Cloudflare edge
Served from Cloudflare's global network, with a light and dark mode that both stay on brand and a store that's quick no matter where the customer is.
Compliance built in
The disclaimers and the no-health-claims framing are part of the template, not something a copywriter has to remember on every page. Consistency is what keeps the store safe.
See it live
The quickest way to get how this store works is to click through it. Start with a category, or jump straight to one of Herb Stomp's best sellers and watch the buy box follow you down the page.
Best sellers
Herb Stomp spent 11 years earning a reputation in Portland that most online stores in this category would kill for. The job was to build them a store that matched it, and to do it in a category where a wrong sentence can get you shut down.
The store is live, the content and the commerce are one thing, and the SEO foundation underneath it is the part their competitors skipped. We're at the start of the ranking work, standing on a base most botanical shops never bother to build.
Selling something people research before they buy?
That's exactly the kind of store this approach is built for. Let's talk about a custom ecommerce site where your content does the selling.
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