Axl Tees

A storefront for AXL / Lahat Bawal, an independent streetwear brand in Puerto Princesa selling graphic tees across regular, cropped, and off-shoulder cuts. Rather than a hosted commerce platform, it runs Payload CMS inside the Next.js app, with Postgres for catalog and orders, S3-compatible object storage for media, and PayMongo for checkout.

The brand needed real checkout (cards, GCash, Maya) on effectively no fixed monthly budget. The obvious answer was a hosted platform, but Shopify Payments does not serve the Philippines, which means a third-party gateway plus Shopify's additional transaction fee on top of a monthly subscription. Medusa's managed hosting started at $29/month for development. Saleor's free tier is non-commercial. Every turnkey option either failed on payments or failed on cost.

I evaluated the platforms against the actual constraint, Philippine payment methods at ₱449–₱499 price points, and found the economics inverted the usual advice. PayMongo costs roughly ₱6–₱11 per GCash or Maya transaction and ₱27–₱29 on a domestic card, so per-transaction fees beat any fixed subscription at this volume. That made a custom backend viable, but only if it didn't mean hand-building an admin dashboard. Payload CMS resolved that: it runs inside the same Next.js app, generates the admin UI from schema, and its e-commerce plugin supplies cart and order primitives, leaving me to implement only the PayMongo flow explicitly.