About YourCart

I'm Charl van der Merwe. I spent five years building YourCart solo.

It started because I kept watching the same pattern play out. A small UK shop — a coffee roaster in Edinburgh, a bakery in Bristol, a wine seller in Manchester — would want a mobile app. Their customers lived on their phones. A home-screen icon, push notifications when a new roast landed, one-tap reorder for regulars. Obvious value. And every time, the same answer: a five-figure agency build, or an app-builder subscription on top of the Shopify bill, forever.

That felt wrong. These were the shops that defined a neighbourhood. Charging them ten times more for an app than for a storefront was absurd. So I started building an alternative.

I'm not a VC-backed team. I wrote every line of the Flutter client, every Flask API endpoint, every SQL Server schema, every Azure deployment script. Not because I'm a purist — because I didn't want debt, investor timelines, or pressure to raise prices later. I wanted a product small shops could afford and keep affording.

Five years is a long time. I got a lot wrong. Early on I tried to build a marketplace — wrong model, killed it. I over-engineered the admin portal. I rewrote the checkout three times. I ignored push notifications for two years when they turned out to be the feature that mattered most.

YourCart now comes in two shapes. If you're starting from scratch, YourCart is the whole thing: your web store plus your own branded iPhone and Android apps. If you already sell on Shopify, YourCart is a sales channel instead. Your Shopify catalogue syncs into your own branded apps, checkout stays on your own Shopify checkout with your payments and your taxes, and the orders land back in your Shopify admin as normal orders. Same apps, same care, two ways in.

The Shopify sales-channel app was submitted to the Shopify App Store on 14 August 2026 and is in review. It isn't installable until Shopify approves it, and I'll say so here the day it is.

What I didn't compromise on: every merchant gets their own branded app. Not a white-label skin of a generic YourCart app, but your name, your logo, your icon, on every customer's home screen. The infrastructure underneath (Firebase, the developer accounts, hosting) is YourCart's, and that's what keeps the price where it is. If you walk away, your data, your domain and your customers come with you. The Google Play listing stays with us: that's the trade.

YourCart is in beta now. Things will occasionally break, and I'll tell you when they do. Early merchants get a direct line to the roadmap: what they ask for genuinely shapes what gets built next. In exchange I ask for a testimonial after their first sale and a 15-minute case-study chat after their fifth. No scheduled calls otherwise. I answer every support email myself. You'll have my mobile number.

If you run an independent UK shop and your customers come back, I'd like to talk.

Charl
Founder, YourCart
admin@yourcart.store

YourCart is built and run from Greater Manchester, in the North West of England — close to the kind of independent high-street shops it's made for.

YOURCART.STORE LTD is registered in England and Wales, company number 15316188. Registered office: 15 Timperley Lane, Leigh, Greater Manchester, WN7 3DZ, United Kingdom.