How to Build an AI-Powered E-Commerce Platform: 61,359 Lines of Code with HeyGen, Stripe, and Vimeo

The Setup

You want to sell AI-generated personalized video — or any digital product that requires real-time generation, payment processing, and automated delivery. You start evaluating your platform options and immediately hit a wall.

Shopify charges $2,000 per month for its Plus plan and still constrains you within its template system. BigCommerce Enterprise starts at similar price points with annual contracts. WooCommerce is technically free, but the average enterprise WooCommerce build runs $50,000-$200,000 when you factor in plugin licensing, custom development, and hosting infrastructure (G2 custom e-commerce development cost benchmarks place the range at $50,000-$250,000 for mid-complexity builds). Statista's 2024 e-commerce platform market share data shows Shopify and WooCommerce collectively dominate over 50% of the market — meaning the majority of online sellers are locked into platforms that were never designed for AI-generated, made-to-order digital products.

The core problem is architectural. SaaS platforms like Shopify are built around inventory-based physical goods with a cart-checkout-ship workflow. When your product is generated on demand — an AI video personalized to a specific customer's input, rendered by an API, hosted on a third-party video platform, and delivered via email — the standard e-commerce stack fights you at every step. You end up duct-taping webhooks, writing custom apps against restrictive APIs, and paying platform fees on a transaction model that does not match your cost structure.

The alternative is building custom. But custom e-commerce development at market rates means $150,000-$300,000 and 6-12 months for a team of 3-5 developers, according to G2 benchmarks and Clutch's agency pricing surveys. Most founders with an AI product idea cannot absorb that cost or timeline before validating demand.

What the Data Shows

Shopify Plus at $2,000/month costs $24,000 annually before transaction fees, apps, and theme customization. BigCommerce Enterprise pricing is quote-based but typically runs $1,000-$3,000/month at equivalent scale. WooCommerce hosting on a managed provider (WP Engine, Kinsta) starts at $30-$60/month but the plugin stack for subscriptions, affiliate tracking, and multi-currency support rapidly escalates — WooCommerce stores with equivalent functionality commonly spend $200-$500/month on plugin licensing alone (WooCommerce marketplace and independent plugin vendor pricing, 2025).

The AI video market itself is growing rapidly. The sector reached $614.8 million in 2024 and is projected to hit $2.56 billion by 2032. HeyGen alone has over 100,000 business customers and was named G2's fastest-growing product of 2025. But HeyGen is a generation tool, not a commerce platform. A HeyGen account does not give you a purchase funnel, payment processing, affiliate tracking, regional pricing, or automated delivery infrastructure.

PRJ-06 was built to fill exactly this gap: a complete AI-powered e-commerce platform — 61,359 lines of custom code across 217 code files, shipped in 28 active development days within a 37-day calendar window (November 18 to December 24, 2025). The platform integrates four external services: HeyGen for AI video generation, Stripe for payment processing, Vimeo for video hosting and delivery, and Trackdesk for affiliate tracking. Additional integrations include SendGrid for email automation and GTM for analytics tracking.

The build metrics tell the execution story:

Metric	Value
Total lines of code	61,359
Total commits	292
Net-new delivery commits	243 (83.2%)
Rework commits	49 (16.8%)
Reverts	0
Peak day	Dec 7 — 37 commits
Peak sprint	Dec 5-9 — 113 commits in 5 days (22.6/day)
Active development days	28

The codebase breaks down to 31,421 lines of PHP, 20,156 lines of CSS, and 9,782 lines of JavaScript. Contributors: Michael George Keating at 60.3% (176 commits), AI-assisted scaffolding at 12.3% (36 commits), and CON-01 at 27.7% (81 commits) handling the Laravel scaffold and portal iterations.

The rework profile reveals where complexity concentrated. Phase 2 (checkout and scene-based video selection) hit 40.0% rework — this is where Stripe integration, HeyGen's API behavior, and the multi-step purchase funnel collided. Phase 5 (QA and regional pricing) hit 41.7% rework during explicit quality assurance. Phase 6 (final polish) closed at 0.0% rework. The build stabilized. Total reverts across the entire project: zero.

The replacement value benchmarks the efficiency. Market rate for an AI video SaaS platform with payment processing, affiliate tracking, regional pricing, and automated delivery: $150,000-$300,000. Actual build cost (sweep allocation): $2,863. That is a 52x-105x cost multiple.

How It Works

The platform architecture was purpose-built for made-to-order digital products, not adapted from an inventory-based template. The purchase funnel — a single 5,210-line JavaScript file (funnel.js) — handles the entire consumer journey: scene-based avatar selection, personalization input, pricing display with regional currency support (US dollar and Indian rupee via a dedicated CurrencyService), Stripe checkout, and order confirmation. Each step maps to a database event tracked through a FunnelEvent model, giving the operator full funnel analytics without third-party tools.

When a customer completes purchase, the system fires a request to HeyGen's API with the personalization parameters (child's name, selected scenes, avatar choices). HeyGen generates the video. A webhook from HeyGen triggers the platform to upload the completed video to Vimeo, generate a secure viewing link, and deliver it to the customer via email automation. The entire generation-to-delivery pipeline is automated — no manual intervention required between payment and video delivery.

The revenue architecture goes beyond simple per-unit sales. Family bundles auto-unlock at 5+ videos with discounted per-unit pricing ($12-$15 versus $15-$20 for singles). Rush delivery upsells add $5-$10 per order. A free viral lead funnel uses share-to-unlock tiers to drive organic acquisition — customers share a free video link, and when their shares hit threshold, they unlock a free personalized video, generating a new lead. Affiliate tracking through Trackdesk assigns commission per paid order driven by external traffic. The Spanish language support and INR regional pricing demonstrate that the architecture is not locked to a single market or language.

The database layer is lean by design: 10 models (User, Customer, Order, OrderItem, Product, VideoRequest, CheckoutSession, LeadShare, FunnelEvent, WebhookLog), 13 controllers, 4 services, and 12 migrations. This is deliberate. A custom build does not need 135 database tables (as a full CDP like PRJ-01 does). It needs exactly the tables its domain requires — and the discipline to stop there.

Critically, the architecture is occasion-agnostic. Santa was the first vertical. The same funnel, payment processing, affiliate infrastructure, and video generation pipeline works for birthdays, Valentine's Day, Easter, graduations, and corporate greetings. Each new occasion vertical requires new avatar scenes and a landing page variant — not a new platform.

What This Means for E-Commerce Founders

If you are building an AI-generated digital product and evaluating whether to use Shopify, WooCommerce, or a custom build, the platform choice is an architectural decision that constrains everything downstream. Shopify and WooCommerce are excellent for physical inventory. They are structurally wrong for made-to-order AI products that require API-driven generation, webhook-based delivery pipelines, and per-unit cost models tied to external AI services.

PRJ-06 demonstrates that a production-complete AI e-commerce platform — with HeyGen generation, Stripe payments, Vimeo delivery, Trackdesk affiliates, regional pricing, viral lead funnels, and family bundle logic — can be built in 28 active days at a cost of $2,863 against a market replacement value of $150,000-$300,000. The platform is production-ready: a buyer needs four API keys (Stripe, HeyGen, Vimeo, Trackdesk), SMTP credentials, and a traffic source to begin generating revenue. The gap-to-revenue is not product development. It is marketing and ad creative. That is the economics of AI-assisted custom development applied to e-commerce — and it changes the build-versus-buy calculation entirely.

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Related: C1_S16, C1_S17

References

1. Shopify (2025). Shopify Plus pricing (shopify.com). $2,000/month for Plus plan.
2. BigCommerce (2025). Enterprise pricing (bigcommerce.com). Quote-based, typically $1,000-$3,000/month.
3. WooCommerce (2025). Marketplace plugin pricing (woocommerce.com). $200-$500/month for equivalent functionality plugin stacks.
4. Statista (2024). E-commerce platform market share data. Shopify and WooCommerce collectively dominating over 50%.
5. G2 (2025). Custom e-commerce development cost benchmarks ($50,000-$250,000 for mid-complexity builds).
6. Clutch (2025). Agency pricing survey. Custom e-commerce development at $150,000-$300,000 for 3-5 developer teams.
7. Fortune Business Insights (2024). AI video market size analysis ($614.8 million in 2024, projected $2.56 billion by 2032).
8. HeyGen (2025). G2 fastest-growing product recognition. Over 100,000 business customers.