How I set up this store

Stickerutopia is a one-person shop. I print, cut, pack, and ship, so everything else has to run with as little of my time as possible. Here's what's behind the site.

The website

The shop is its own website rather than a listing on a marketplace. It's built with Next.js and hosted on Vercel. The sticker catalog and orders live in a Supabase database, and the sticker images are stored on Vercel. I built it with a lot of help from an AI coding assistant.

You don't need to build your own site to start. Etsy or a hosted store like Shopify gets you selling in an afternoon. I wanted full control over pages, prices, and search, which is easier on a site you own.

Payments

Checkout runs on Stripe. Customers don't need an account, and Stripe handles the card details, so they never touch my site. Discounts, like the pack deals and the 10% codes, are worked out on my side and passed to Stripe as one discount on the order.

Listings drafted by AI

With hundreds of designs, writing every title and description by hand wasn't realistic. When I add a sticker, I upload its image and an AI model (Claude, made by Anthropic) looks at it and drafts a title, description, tags, and category. Every new sticker also lands in a review queue, where I read the AI's wording and fix anything that's off.

The AI is good at describing what's in a picture. It's not a substitute for knowing your product: claims about materials, durability, and sizes come from me, not from the model.

Pricing

Pricing is deliberately simple: $1 per inch, so a 3″ sticker is $3. On top of that, any four 3″ stickers are $10 and any six are $14, and there are a few fixed bundles. Bundles and pack deals are how the shop raises the size of an order without cutting the price of a single sticker.

Shipping

US orders ship within 1 business day in a plain envelope and arrive in 3–5 days. Shipping is a flat $1.99, free on orders over $12.00. Stickers are light and flat, which keeps postage low. That's one of the best things about selling them.

Emails and reviews

Order confirmations and shipping updates go out automatically through Resend, an email service. About a week after an order ships, the customer gets one email inviting them to review what they bought. Reviews only come from real orders, and I approve each one before it appears.

Getting found

The site sends Google a product feed so stickers can show up in Google Shopping, and it's organized into collections like coffee, cats, and butterflies, which are the pages most likely to show up in search. That part of the shop is still growing.

If you're starting out

You don't need any of this on day one. A few good designs you're licensed to sell (see where I license mine), a reliable way to print them, and somewhere to sell them is enough. Add the rest as orders grow.