Saint Joseph's College of Maine is a Catholic liberal arts college on the shores of Sebago Lake, founded in 1912 and rooted in the Mercy tradition. It serves students on its Standish campus and through a large online program that reaches well beyond Maine.
In the spring of 2020, the campus closed. The college store closed with it.
That store had never sold anything online. It ran entirely on a point-of-sale system at the counter in the Alfond Center, which worked perfectly well right up until the moment nobody could walk through the door. Commencement was weeks away, an incoming class was being recruited sight-unseen, and the one place families, alumni and students could buy anything with the college's name on it was locked.
The college reached out with a plain question: what would it take to get a basic store live, and how fast? They wanted to be selling at least a week before commencement.
We planned a phased delivery around one fixed date. Commencement is the busiest buying moment in a college store’s year — graduating students, their families and alumni all reaching for something with the college’s name on it — and in 2020 it was weeks away. Version one had to be transacting before it, so the college could meet that demand rather than miss it entirely. We signed the scope with fifteen days to get version one transacting.
Getting there meant being honest about what to leave out. We built on Shopify using an existing theme translated to the college's brand rather than a custom design, ran a single round of revisions instead of the usual several, and launched with a tight product set the college's own student workers photographed. Everything that could wait — expanded catalog, refinements, the second version — was scheduled for a second phase.
The harder question was financial reporting. The college runs Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains, and every online sale would need to reconcile against it. We priced the thorough answer honestly: a full Shopify-to-Great-Plains connector, roughly $12,000 plus ongoing monthly fees, and eight to ten weeks of work.
Eight to ten weeks was the entire problem. It would have put the store live long after commencement, and the college had already invested in integration work for its existing on-campus system.
So we recommended against it. Instead we built an automated custom report in Shopify that produced exactly the fields the finance office needed to reconcile each bank deposit — order numbers, item numbers, sale price, sales tax, and platform fees, tied to the payout rather than the sale date, because those are not the same thing and reconciling against the wrong one is where this normally falls apart.
It was the smaller answer. It was also the one that shipped in time.
The store launched ahead of commencement and was taking orders through the spring. Design, build, testing and training were all delivered within four weeks of kickoff, and we handed over full control — which was the point: a college store cannot depend on an agency to add a sweatshirt.
By the end of the summer, with students back on campus, Maya Atlas wrote to tell us the store had passed 338 transactions — “a small but mighty victory,” in her words, for a sales channel that had not existed four months earlier.
Six years later it is still the Saint Joseph's College campus store, and it is no longer a minimum viable anything. The catalog has grown from the handful of products it launched with to 78, spanning apparel, hats, Yeti drinkware, Sea Bags of Maine totes, diploma frames, baby onesies and dog bandanas — merchandising decisions the college has made on its own since the day we handed it over.
Phase two took the store off the web page and back into the room. We rolled out a Shopify POS channel alongside the online storefront and set up mobile commerce, so the college could take payment at alumni gatherings and sporting events — one catalog, one inventory count, one set of numbers for the finance office, selling wherever its community actually gathered.
The physical store reopened too, and the system now runs every channel the college sells through: online orders ship, the Alfond Center counter rings sales on the same platform, and a mobile setup travels to events. What began as an emergency replacement for a closed counter became the way the college sells, everywhere it sells.
Now, more than ever, having ecommerce is so hugely helpful. I want to thank you again for your work in getting such a beautiful site launched for us. It was so easy and enjoyable to work with your team.
Maya Atlas — Saint Joseph's College of Maine
The most valuable thing we did on this project was talk the client out of spending $12,000.
A full ERP integration was the technically superior answer, and we could have sold it. But it would have taken eight to ten weeks the college did not have, on top of integration work they had already paid for, at a moment when every budget in higher education was under review. The right recommendation was the cheaper one that met the actual deadline — an automated report that gave the finance office what it needed to reconcile, and nothing it did not.
Six years of continuous operation is the argument that it was the right call. Speed and frugality are not the enemies of durability. Quite often they are the reason something lasts.
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