Build journal · Kabab Cafe Market · Wayne, PA
A Persian market, taken online.
How Kabab Cafe’s in-store market — a shelf-lined corner only locals could reach — became a Shopify store that ships across the country.
The why
Kabab Cafe has cooked out of the Gateway shopping center in Wayne, Pennsylvania since 2009 — a family-run Persian kitchen where everything is halal, nothing is fried, and the kebabs, rice, and salads are made fresh every day. For most of its life the business ran the way a lot of small restaurants do: on walk-ins, regulars, and word of mouth. That model works right up until the day it doesn’t. Like so many neighborhood spots, Kabab Cafe took a hard hit through COVID-19, when foot traffic thinned out and the dining room went quiet.
But the restaurant had an asset hiding in plain sight. Tucked inside the space was a small Persian market — shelves of imported goods, pantry staples, teas, sweets, and specialty items you can’t easily find at a regular grocery store. The problem was geography. To buy any of it, you had to physically be in Wayne. A customer twenty miles away who grew up on these exact products had no way to get them. The market was real, it was good, and it was invisible to everyone who couldn’t drive to the strip mall.
Sitting down with the family
The first real work wasn’t on a computer — it was at a table. I sat down with the family and we went through what the market actually was, shelf by shelf. What do you carry? What sells? What’s seasonal, what’s always in stock, what do people ask for by name? A lot of the inventory lived in their heads and on the shelves, not in any spreadsheet. So we catalogued it: product names, the way regulars refer to them, sizes, and the categories that would make sense to someone shopping online rather than reaching for a shelf. The family prefers to stay out of the spotlight, so I’ll leave their names out of this — but their knowledge of every item is the reason the store reads as authentic.
Choosing Shopify, digitizing the shelves
For a store like this, Shopify was the honest choice. It handles the parts of e-commerce that are genuinely hard — inventory, secure checkout, taxes, shipping rates — so the family can focus on the products instead of the plumbing. From the catalogue we’d built, I digitized the market into products: each item written up clearly, organized into collections a shopper can actually browse, and priced to match the shelf. The goal was that a customer landing cold on the store could understand what a product is and why they’d want it, even without the context of standing in the shop.
Making it feel like one business
A market that looks like a generic Shopify template would quietly undercut the whole thing. The restaurant already had a look and a feel — warm, unfussy, no-nonsense, the same character as the food. So I styled the storefront to match: the colors, the type, and the tone all pull from the restaurant’s brand so that a customer moving from the restaurant to the market never feels like they’ve been handed off to a stranger. It should read as one Kabab Cafe, whether you’re reading a menu or filling a cart.
Pickup, delivery, and shipping
Not every customer wants the same thing, so the store meets them where they are. Local regulars can order online and pick up in-store — the same market, minus the wondering whether an item is in stock. Delivery is set up for people who’d rather have it brought to them. And for customers ordering from further afield, shipping is free on orders over $100, which nudges the online market toward the way people actually stock a pantry: a few things at once, not a single jar. The checkout is mobile-first, because that’s where most of this shopping happens.
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Pickup
Order online, grab it in-store in Wayne.
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Delivery
Brought to nearby customers who’d rather stay in.
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Free shipping $100+
Ships to customers well beyond the Main Line.
A clear path from the restaurant
A new store is only as good as the road to it. Plenty of people know kababcafe.com — they go there for the menu and the hours. So the last piece was wiring an obvious, unmissable path from the restaurant’s site to the market, so that anyone who lands on Kabab Cafe for dinner also learns that they can now take a piece of the pantry home, or have it shipped. No detective work, no dead ends. One click from “what’s for dinner” to “what’s on the shelf.”
Launch, June 2026
Kabab Cafe Market went live in June 2026. For a restaurant that spent years defined by its four walls, it’s a genuine change in reach: a customer who lives nowhere near Wayne — someone who grew up with these teas and sweets and pantry staples, or who just discovered Persian cooking and can’t source the ingredients — can finally order them and have them arrive. The hidden asset isn’t hidden anymore. The market that only locals could reach is now open to anyone with an address, and it still feels, in every detail, like the same family kitchen that’s been in that shopping center since 2009.
