A cosmetics shop rebuilt from scratch after the old one went dark

A German agency came to me with a cosmetics brand whose hosted store had gone offline. Customers had nowhere to buy, and old links led nowhere. Product photos, reviews and old addresses were left only in caches and web archives.

So first I collected what was left of the old store: the reviews, the consent banner, every old address. The logo, the product photos and the before/after images I saved from its image server.

A checkout that holds up in Germany

A cosmetics shop in Germany has to get a lot right: how prices are shown, the right of withdrawal, invoice details, no tracking before consent. Before building anything I wrote down what the law asks of this shop, together with the questions only the owner could answer.

Then I built the shop on WooCommerce with Germanized and the Blocksy theme, with all custom code in a child theme. The checkout has the order button with the wording the law requires, a terms and withdrawal checkbox, VAT on every price and a unit price where one is needed. The 12 old addresses now redirect to the matching new pages, and 15 reviews came back from a web archive snapshot, marked as unverified purchases. I set the page titles and descriptions in the theme, without an SEO plugin. The whole shop took 13 hours of work, from an empty server to ready to sell.

One thing didn’t work as it should. The consent tool’s own loader kept analytics and the heatmap blocked even after the visitor agreed. I wrote a small consent module that starts them only after consent, and checked it on the live shop.

The shop went live on 9 September 2026 and sells to Germany and Austria. On launch day I went through the live shop once more and found the shipping zone for Austrian buyers missing, so I added it. Later came review stars with the review count in the product cards, linking straight to the reviews, shipped with a script that backs up the live theme first and can put it back.