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: £20,000 from an agency, or £200 a month forever to Tapcart on top of Shopify's bill.

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.

What I didn't compromise on: every merchant gets their own branded app. Not a white-label skin of a generic YourCart app — your name, your logo, your icon, on every customer's home screen. The infrastructure underneath (Firebase, the developer accounts, hosting) is YourCart's, which is what keeps the price at £49. If you walk away, your data, your domain, your customers, and your Stripe relationship come with you. The App Store listing stays with us — that's the trade.

YourCart is in beta now. Things will occasionally break — I'll tell you when they do. The first 20 merchants get £24.50/month for 24 months and a permanent guard against future price rises — and, more importantly, a direct line to the roadmap: what founding-cohort merchants ask for genuinely shapes what gets built next. In exchange: 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.