Why we built Haul: the story behind Dottie's Pet Boutique
11 March 2026 · Huskai · 6 min read
You start a small business because you love making something. Collars, candles, ceramics, whatever it is. People like it, they want to buy it, brilliant. So you go looking for somewhere to sell online.
That's where it stops being fun.
You end up spending half your evenings messing about with platforms, installing apps, calculating fees, trying to make things talk to each other. The actual making part gets squeezed into whatever time is left. The thing you were good at, the reason you started, becomes the bit you never have time for.
That's why we built Haul. It started with one shop that needed a home online, and nothing out there properly fit.
What Dottie's actually needed
Dottie's Pet Boutique makes custom collars, leads, harnesses, and bow ties for dogs and cats. The word "custom" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. A single collar might come in five sizes, nineteen colours, and three hardware finishes. That's nearly 300 combinations before anyone's typed "Bella" or "Captain Whiskers" into the personalisation field.
This isn't some weird edge case. Thousands of makers across the UK sell products exactly like this. But the big platforms treat it like one.
We tried Shopify. It's a good platform, genuinely. But the base plan doesn't handle complex variants, so you need apps. A variant app, a personalisation app, a shipping calculator for UK weight-based postage, something for VAT invoices. Stack all that up and you're paying £75 to £150 a month, plus Shopify's transaction fee on top of Stripe's card processing. For someone doing a few hundred quid a month in sales, the numbers just don't work. We kept hearing the same thing from other sellers looking for a Shopify alternative in the UK. Nobody could find one that made sense at their scale.
Etsy is where most makers start, and fair enough. The traffic's there. But Etsy takes a listing fee, a transaction fee, a payment processing fee, and an offsite ads fee you can't opt out of past a certain revenue. Your margins get thinner with every sale. Your shop looks like Etsy, not like you. Your customers become Etsy's customers. You're building a business on rented land, and the landlord keeps putting the rent up.
If you've been searching for an Etsy alternative for makers, you've probably noticed there aren't many good options that don't just swap one set of problems for another.
Squarespace and Wix look lovely for portfolios and simple shops. But try setting up a product where the price changes based on which combination of size, colour, and hardware the customer picks. You'll be fighting the platform within an hour.
None of them are bad. They just weren't built for this.
So we built it ourselves
We're Huskai, a small software company based in the UK. We build tools for small businesses. At some point the conversation stopped being "which platform should Dottie's use?" and became "what if we just built what Dottie's actually needs?"
The maths made sense. If a maker is paying £100 a month for Shopify plus apps, and we could offer everything they need for £15 to £35 a month with zero transaction fees, that's real money back in their pocket. Every single month. Over a year that could be a thousand pounds or more. That's materials. That's a market stall booking. That's an actual holiday.
So we started building.
What Haul actually does
Haul is a proper e-commerce platform for small sellers in the UK and beyond. Every seller gets their own shop with their own domain, their own branding, their own database. Not a subdirectory on someone else's site. Not a white-label template with someone else's logo in the corner.
Your shop. Your brand. Full stop.
The variant system was the thing we wanted to nail first. You set up your variant groups once (Size, Colour, Hardware) and assign them to product templates. A "Standard Collar" template uses all three. A "Bow Tie" uses just Size and Colour. Each option can adjust the price up or down, so a large collar with brass hardware costs more than a small one in nickel. No third-party apps. No workarounds. It just works.
Personalisation is built in too. You add a custom text field to a product, the customer fills it in, and that text carries through to the basket, the order confirmation email, and your admin dashboard. If you sell handmade products online and personalisation is part of your offering, you shouldn't need a plugin for that.
Then there's all the other stuff a shop needs:
- Weight-based shipping zones (UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, more coming)
- VAT handling and invoices
- Discount codes and sales campaigns
- Customer reviews
- A page builder with over thirty section types
- Email templates you can actually edit (order confirmation, dispatch, the lot)
- SEO tools, sitemaps, meta tags
- Stock tracking with low-stock alerts
One thing we're genuinely proud of: every seller's data lives in its own separate database. Not a shared table where everyone's stuff sits together. Your data is yours. If you ever leave (hopefully you won't), we can export everything for you. No lock-in.
Pricing is simple. £15 a month for Starter (up to 75 products), £35 a month for Pro (unlimited). We don't take transaction fees. You just pay Stripe's standard card processing rate, same as you would anywhere else. That's the whole bill. No surprises three months in when you realise you need another add-on.
The bits that were hard
Building one shop is straightforward enough. Building a platform that runs hundreds of independent shops is a completely different problem.
Multi-tenancy nearly did us in. Every single request has to figure out which shop it's for, connect to the right database, scope the storage correctly, serve the right images. Get that wrong and you don't just break one shop. You could leak someone's customer data into another seller's dashboard. We spent weeks writing isolation tests, poking at every boundary we could think of. Worth every minute, but not the most exciting fortnight of our lives.
Payment processing was its own challenge. Stripe Connect is powerful, but the integration touches everything. Webhooks, subscription billing, trial periods, failed card payments. The kind of edge cases you discover at 11pm on a Friday when you've already shut the laptop.
Email deliverability surprised us. Sending an email is easy. Getting it into someone's inbox instead of their spam folder? Completely different problem. SPF records, DKIM signing, domain reputation. Still learning on that one, honestly.
The whole thing took longer than we thought it would. We'd rather ship something solid than something fast, though. You're trusting us with your business. We take that seriously.
Where things stand
Dottie's Pet Boutique is getting ready to launch as the first shop on Haul. This isn't a mockup or a landing page with a "coming soon" banner. The platform is real and working. The admin dashboard is live, the checkout processes real payments, and there are over 880 automated tests making sure nothing falls over when we push updates.
We're finishing the signup flow and stress-testing everything. The goal is that a new seller can go from signing up to having a live online shop in an afternoon.
Every feature was built because Dottie's needed it. Every bug was found because real products were being listed and real orders were going through. That's the advantage of building a platform alongside an actual shop. You can't pretend the rough edges aren't there when you're the one tripping over them.
What's next
Once Dottie's is live and the platform is solid, we're opening up to other sellers.
Not just pet businesses. Haul works for any independent seller who makes or curates products. Craft sellers, food producers, fashion labels, beauty brands, homeware makers. Anyone who needs proper variants and personalisation, or who's simply tired of overpaying for apps they shouldn't need in the first place.
If you've been looking for affordable ecommerce for small sellers in the UK, something that doesn't nickel-and-dime you with add-ons or take a cut of every sale, that's what we're building.
We've got a list of features we want to add next. Product search, accounting exports, a few other things people have asked for. But we're building based on what sellers actually need, not what looks good in a feature comparison table.
Sound familiar?
If you're a maker or small seller who's tired of watching your fees climb while your margins shrink, we built this for you. Not for enterprise brands. Not for dropshippers. For people who make things and want a proper online shop that doesn't cost the earth.
We're a small UK team. Bootstrapped, no investors, no big launch event. Just building something we think should exist, because nobody else seemed to be building it.
If you want early access, pop your email on the waitlist. We'd genuinely like to hear what you make.