About this publication
IndieMade Research is a daily brief about the modern commerce web. Every day we look at real online shops and write down what they do well, so that anyone building or running a store can see it working before they decide whether they want it.
Who it is for
Makers, handmade sellers, small businesses and anyone choosing a platform for a first online shop. You do not need to be a developer to read it. If a finding needs a technical word, we explain it in a sentence.
Who runs it
The site is published by IndieMade, a company that makes an online store and website builder for artists, makers and small businesses. We run it in the open and under our own name. The subject is commerce, not IndieMade: the stores, apps and themes we cover are on many different platforms, and we pick them because they are good examples, not because of who built them.
What a daily brief contains
- Commerce Site of the Day. One real store that does modern commerce well, and the handful of things it does that a shopper in 2026 expects.
- Feature of the Day. One feature seen working on a merchant's own pages. Not the marketing page, the thing itself.
- Plugin or App of the Day. A popular app for Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace or BigCommerce, what it does, how popular it is, and a store using it.
- Theme of the Day. A theme seen on a real shop, and what makes it work.
- Builder notes. We build this site with a page builder every day, and we keep an honest record of what the page builder can and cannot do.
How we work
Every finding takes one shape: this site, on this platform, has this feature, with a link you can follow to see it yourself. Every finding carries a screenshot we took ourselves, from a public page, on the day it was published. Where it helps, we build a small working mock-up of the feature right on the page so you can click it and see how it behaves. The mock-ups are illustrations: nothing on this site is for sale, and no buttons here take payment.
We confirm each claim on the live page we cite. Stores change constantly, so a finding describes what we saw on the date shown. If something has changed since, the screenshot is the record of what was there.
What we will not do
- We do not take payment for coverage, and stores do not know in advance that they will be featured.
- We do not frame findings as one platform against another. Readers can draw their own conclusions.
- We do not use affiliate links.
Get in touch
Spotted a store doing something clever, or think we got something wrong? You can reach the IndieMade team through indiemade.com.