The shop has had a full refit. Same stock, same testing, same me packing the boxes. What changed is everything around it: how the site looks, how you find a console, and how much you can tell about an item before you buy it. Here is what moved and why.
Why bother
The old site was a default theme with retro games poured into it. It worked, but it looked like any other Shopify store, and it made you do the work. Twenty two console collections sat in one alphabetical block. Product titles ran to fifteen words because they are written for eBay search, not for reading. Condition, the single thing a collector actually cares about, was buried at the bottom of a description.
So the brief was simple. Make it feel like the hardware it sells, and make the information you need arrive earlier.
The look: 1994, on purpose
The whole site now runs on a near black background with an amber and yellow accent, plus red, blue, purple and green used only to mark Nintendo, Sega, Sony and Microsoft. Two typefaces do all the work. Press Start 2P, the classic pixel face, is reserved for headings, prices and buttons. Archivo handles everything you actually have to read.
That split matters. Pixel type is gorgeous in short bursts and punishing in paragraphs, so it never gets used for body copy or long titles. Borders are square, two pixels, and go amber on hover. Nothing is rounded and nothing has a soft shadow, because 16 bit hardware did not.
Homepage
Three directions got mocked up before anything went live: a pitch black arcade cabinet with scanlines, a logo led title screen, and a light collector catalogue. The arcade cabinet won, with the title screen's hero borrowed into it. You land on the shop rather than on a carousel.
Console index
This was the worst offender, and it got the biggest change. The old collections page was 22 tiles in alphabetical order, so a Game Gear sat between a Gamecube and a Game Boy, and the console name was printed over the artwork where half of them were unreadable against a white Game Boy or a green Game Boy Colour.
Now:
- Names moved off the artwork onto a solid plate underneath, so every one of them is legible.
- Tiles are grouped by brand, Sega first, then Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, each with its own accent colour and a live count of systems and items in stock.
- An ALL STOCK banner sits at the top for anyone who would rather just scroll the lot, newest first.
- A jump bar under it lists every brand with its system count, so you can see the full breadth of the shop without scrolling and get to Sega in one click.
Counts and titles are pulled live from the shop, so when a new console arrives the page updates itself.
Collection pages
Product titles are long because they feed eBay listings, and they are staying long. That is not laziness, it is how the listings get found. What changed is how they are displayed.
Each card now splits its title. The game name goes on top in pixel type, and everything after it becomes small chips underneath: CIB, TESTED, BOXED NO MANUAL, CART ONLY. The console name gets stripped out, because you already know which collection you are in. The full original title is still there on hover and still read out by screen readers, so nothing is lost.
Alongside that: five products per row instead of three, filters moved into a horizontal bar across the top instead of eating a sidebar, and prices pinned to the bottom of every card so they line up across a row no matter how many chips a title generates.
Product pages and the condition report
Every item gets a condition report: a graded table covering cartridge, case, manual and inlay, each with a note and a grade from MINT down, and a closing line saying exactly what was tested and on what hardware. "Tested end to end on a Mega Drive 2, saves, sound and both players confirmed working" tells you more than any stock photo.
It is built on product metafields rather than typed into each description, which means it is consistent across the shop and cannot drift out of format.
What is next
A few things are still on the list: proper artwork for the All Stock collection, tidying the last of the heading alignment, and more photos of items in hand. If something on the site looks broken or reads oddly, tell me. I would rather hear it than not.
Everything else is unchanged. Every console and game is tested on real hardware before it is listed, and if it does not work when it reaches you, it comes back to me.