I had a perfectly sensible ecommerce website.
Then I built a shed in it.
An actual 3D go-kart workshop you can walk around, build a kart in, take onto a track and gradually abuse until the parts wear out.
The sensible idea underneath the nonsense
Most ecommerce still follows the same pattern:
Search → Product → Basket → Checkout.
That is fine for simple products.
Technical products create a different question:
“What happens if I fit this?”
Kart Shed is an experiment in answering that question interactively.
What you can do
- Build a kart from real component types.
- Change gearing, tyres, brakes and other parts.
- Drive it and feel the difference.
- Wear components out.
- Inspect condition and link back to the real item.
Then I got carried away
There are five marshals. Crash near one and you may get a yellow flag and a disappointed reaction based on your actual driving stats.
There is a kart graveyard where you can rummage for questionable used parts.
And the 10mm socket has a chance of disappearing while you are doing the rear wheel nuts, because realism matters.
If desperation sets in, there is an emergency 10mm box by the door. It can be smashed once a day.
What worked
The most useful part is that the game connects entertainment back to product understanding. A gearing change is not just text in a table; you can drive the kart and feel the trade-off.
That opens up a much more interesting question for ecommerce: instead of only describing a product, can the website let somebody experience the consequence of choosing it?
What is next
Kart Shed is deliberately unfinished. I want the odd ideas to come from people using it.
If you have a suggestion, especially a bad one, send it over. The best wrong answers have a suspicious habit of becoming features.
Steal the idea, not the secrets
Want to build your own version?
This is the public build brief: enough architecture to get moving, without the production-specific wiring that took the painful bit to discover.
Build a browser-based 3D product configurator disguised as a small driving game.
Concept:
A user walks around a virtual workshop, builds a kart from swappable components, drives it on a short track and feels the effect of the choices they made.
Requirements:
- Represent components as reusable data objects rather than hard-coded scenery.
- Let gearing, tyres, brakes and other parts affect simple driving characteristics.
- Track component condition or wear over time.
- Show the fitted parts and their current state in a kart sheet.
- Link configurable parts back to real product pages.
- Add a small track with lap timing and basic driving telemetry.
- Include NPC or marshal reactions driven by actual player behaviour.
- Add one deliberately ridiculous workshop mechanic that people will remember.
- Keep game logic separate from the ecommerce data layer.
- Make it usable before trying to make the physics perfect.
Do not copy another site's game assets, exact balancing, anti-cheat logic, probability tables or production product-data wiring. Build your own version around your own products and sense of humour.