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How we built live rate-driven pricing, a weight-derived catalogue, a two-way buy-and-sell counter and a tiered membership programme for Gold Bank — a London bullion dealer trading since 1986.
Gold Bank is a London bullion dealer selling certified gold, silver and platinum to UK investors. From the outside it looks like an ordinary shop. It is not. In ordinary retail a price is a number somebody typed in and changes occasionally. Here it is derived continuously from a world market rate, multiplied by weight, purity and a product premium — and it has to stay consistent from the listing through the basket to the payment.
The platform is also a two-way counter. Customers do not only buy: they send metal back in, have it assessed, and take an offer against the live rate. Add mandatory identity verification before an account can trade, insured high-value delivery, tax status carried as a shoppable product attribute, and a four-tier membership programme that earns on selling as well as buying, and the shape of the problem is much closer to a trading system than to a storefront.
Digital Innovation built the e-commerce platform behind it. It is live at goldbank.co.uk, so every capability described on this page can be checked in a click — which is the only reason we are willing to describe them.
Every off-the-shelf commerce platform assumes a price is a stored number, that goods only travel in one direction, and that compliance is a policy page. A bullion dealer breaks all three assumptions on day one.
Gold and silver are repriced continuously on the world market. A normal shop can print a price on a product page and leave it there for a month. A bullion dealer cannot: the number on the page has to follow the spot rate, and it has to be the same number at checkout that it was in the basket, or the dealer eats the difference on every order.
A 100g bar and a 1oz coin are not two prices to be typed in; they are the same live rate multiplied by weight, purity and a product-specific premium. Get the derivation wrong on one line and you mis-sell a five-figure item.
A bullion dealer is a two-way counter, not a shop. The person who bought last year is the person selling this year, and selling brings its own flow — valuation, physical inspection, an offer, and payment — that ordinary e-commerce software has no concept of.
Every parcel is a target, every account needs an identity check before it can trade, and in the UK some coins are free of capital gains tax while others are not. Identity, insurance and tax status are not administrative details here — they are product and checkout logic.
Each item below is visible on the live site. Where a figure is the client’s commercial policy rather than something we engineered — carrier prices, insurance limits — we describe it as theirs.
The gold and silver spot rates run in the site header, quoted per ounce and per gram, and the catalogue prices follow them. The rate is not decoration on a marketing page — it is the input every product price on the site is calculated from.
Products are modelled by weight rather than by a typed-in price, from 0.10 grams up to 5 kilograms, including the denominations the trade actually uses — 31.10 grams (1oz), 62.20 grams (2oz). Price falls out of weight and the live rate instead of being maintained by hand across hundreds of lines.
Filtering across metal and format (gold, silver, platinum and palladium; bars and coins), around twenty refiners and mints including The Royal Mint, Perth Mint, PAMP, Umicore and Metalor, exact weights, more than twenty themed collections, and mint years running from 1901 to 2026.
UK investors care whether a coin is exempt from capital gains tax, because it changes the return. The site carries a Capital Gains Tax Free collection alongside the ordinary ones, so tax treatment is something a buyer can shop by rather than something they have to research elsewhere.
A customer requests a free insured selling pack, sends the metal in, and the company assesses purity and weight in its valuation centre before making an offer against live rates. Decline the offer and the items come back, insured, at no charge. This is the half of the business that off-the-shelf e-commerce simply does not have.
The client states that the offered price is "automatically locked until your specified delivery/collection date". In a market that reprices every minute, holding a quote for a named date is a commercial promise the software has to be able to keep.
Four tiers — Bronze up to 10k points, Silver up to 250k, Platinum up to 1M, and Gold above that — earning at 1× through 4×. Points accrue on selling as well as buying, which is the interesting part: the programme rewards the whole two-way relationship rather than only the outbound sale.
Identity checks are mandatory to open an account. On the client's own wording they exist so the company "can confirm who you are and keep your account safe when buying/selling with us" — verification sits in front of the transaction rather than being an afterthought at payment.
Multiple carrier options at checkout with different speeds and destinations, from Royal Mail Special Delivery through DHL Express worldwide, all fully insured in transit, signature required, tracking above a threshold, a same-day dispatch cut-off, and Click & Collect for customers who would rather present ID in person than receive a parcel.
None of this needs to be taken on trust. Open goldbank.co.uk, watch the spot rate in the header, filter the catalogue by weight or by mint year, and read the client’s own selling and delivery pages. We would rather point you at their site than ask you to believe ours.
Bullion sounds like a niche until you line the mechanics up against your own. If anything you sell is priced off a rate you do not control — or if your customers ever sell back to you — this is your problem wearing someone else’s product category.
| What we built for Gold Bank | The same capability in your business |
|---|---|
| Spot rate ingested and published across the catalogue | Live market or index pricing — any product priced off a rate you do not control: commodities, fuel, currency, freight, energy. |
| Price derived from weight, purity and premium | Calculated pricing — price as a formula over product attributes rather than a stored number per SKU. |
| The basket price honoured through to checkout | Quote integrity — the guarantee that the number the customer agreed to is the number that gets charged, in a system where the underlying price is moving. |
| Price locked until a named delivery or collection date | Quote validity windows and forward pricing — committing to a price for a defined period. |
| Buying and selling from the same account | Two-way trade, trade-in and buyback — the customer as supplier as well as buyer, on one identity and one ledger. |
| Valuation, physical inspection, then an offer | Inspection-led intake — goods assessed on arrival before a price is agreed, as in returns, recycling, refurbishment and trade-in. |
| Mandatory identity checks before an account can trade | KYC and onboarding verification — the compliance gate in front of the transaction. |
| Capital Gains Tax Free as a shoppable collection | Tax and regulatory status as a product attribute — VAT treatment, duty class, age restriction, licence requirement. |
| Catalogue filtered by metal, brand, weight, collection and year | Faceted search over attributes that actually drive the purchase decision, not a generic category tree. |
| Tiered points earned on both buying and selling | Loyalty economics measured on total relationship value rather than outbound revenue alone. |
| Insured, signed-for, tracked delivery with carrier choice | High-value logistics — insurance limits, chain of custody and proof of delivery as part of checkout rather than an afterthought. |
| Click & Collect against ID and proof of address | Verified in-person handover for goods too valuable or too regulated to leave on a doorstep. |
We are not claiming to have built a trading exchange. We are saying that the awkward parts of one — a price that moves, a quote that has to be honoured, an intake flow that values goods before agreeing a price, and a compliance gate in front of the transaction — are already running in production in a business where getting them wrong is expensive.
The fair objection to this case study is that your market is not the bullion market — your rate source, your margins, your regulator and your tax rules are all different. That is correct. So here is the split we would give you in a first call: what genuinely reuses, and what we would build new.
Already designed, built and running in production.
The parts that are specific to what you sell and where.
We would rather show you this split now than discover it in month two. The left column is why this engagement starts ahead of a blank page; the right column is what a paid discovery sprint scopes and prices.
Almost none of the hard work in a build like this is visible on the surface. The catalogue, the checkout and the account pages are ordinary. These four things are not.
The live rate has to reach every surface that quotes a price — listing, product page, basket, checkout — without each one asking the source independently and drifting apart from the others. That is a caching and propagation problem long before it is a design problem.
Between the moment a customer sees a price and the moment the payment clears, the market has moved. Deciding when a quote is committed, how long it holds and what happens when it expires is the single most consequential design decision in the build.
Modelling price as a derivation over weight, purity and premium means hundreds of catalogue lines reprice themselves. The alternative — a human maintaining prices against a moving market — does not scale past a small range and is wrong more often than it is right.
Identity checks, insurance limits, carrier rules and collection with ID are not bolt-ons around a standard checkout; they change what checkout is allowed to do and when. Building them in from the start avoids the rewrite that comes from bolting compliance onto a finished shop.
You will notice we have not published a technology stack for this engagement. Everything else on this page can be checked against the client’s live site in a click, and we are not willing to hold one section to a lower standard than the rest. Ask us on a call and we will walk you through the choices properly.
The platform is live and trading. A dealer that has been in the precious metals business since 1986 now runs its buying and selling through one system, with prices that follow the market, an account that works in both directions, and a membership programme that measures the whole relationship.
These three figures are published by Gold Bank on their own homepage. We reproduce them as their statement. We did not measure them and we will not present them as results we produced.
There are no other numbers on this page. We do not hold client-approved performance figures for this engagement, and a case study with almost no metrics is worth more than one with metrics we cannot stand behind. Where we can quantify an outcome, we do.
Signals you can check about the client without asking either of us:
Commodities, fuel, metals, currency, freight and energy all share the same core problem: the price is set somewhere else and keeps changing. The machinery for ingesting a rate, deriving prices from it and honouring a quote is the same regardless of what is being sold.
If your customers sell back to you — electronics, jewellery, vehicles, equipment — you need the intake half: valuation, physical inspection, an offer, and a payment path, all against the same account that buys from you.
Where identity checks, insurance limits and verified handover apply, compliance belongs inside the checkout rather than in a policy page beside it. That shapes the build from the first sprint.
Rewarding sales as well as purchases sounds like a small change and is not. It requires the programme to run off total relationship value, which changes both the data model and what the business can measure.
The e-commerce platform behind goldbank.co.uk — the catalogue and its filtering, pricing driven by the live spot rate, the checkout, the customer account, the sell-side flow and the tiered membership programme. The platform is live, so every capability described on this page can be checked against the client's own site rather than taken on our word.
Because we only publish figures we can point at. The three percentages we do quote — 99.5% repeat customers, 97% happy customers and a 3-minute average checkout — are the client's own published figures on their homepage, and we label them as theirs. We hold no client-approved performance figures for this engagement, and we would rather run a case study with almost no metrics than one with metrics we cannot stand behind.
The price. In ordinary retail a price is a stored number that someone changes occasionally. Here it is derived continuously from a world market rate multiplied by weight, purity and a premium, and it has to stay consistent from the listing through the basket to the payment. Everything else — the catalogue, the checkout, the account — is normal commerce sitting on top of that one hard problem.
It is the input to the catalogue, not a decoration. Gold and silver rates run in the site header quoted per ounce and per gram, and product prices are derived from them together with weight and premium rather than being maintained by hand.
Yes, and it is the closest match in our portfolio to that brief. The reusable parts are rate ingestion, price as a formula over attributes, quote integrity through to checkout, and a price that can be locked for a defined window. What changes is your rate source and its licence terms, the pricing formula your market uses, and any hedging rules if you carry exposure between order and settlement.
Both, and the sell side is the more interesting half. A customer requests a free insured selling pack, sends the metal in, and receives an offer against live rates after purity and weight are assessed — with the items returned free of charge, insured, if the offer is declined. Trade-in, buyback and recycling businesses need exactly this shape: inspection-led intake against the same account that buys.
As a product attribute. Some UK coins are exempt from capital gains tax and others are not, which materially changes an investor's return, so the site carries a Capital Gains Tax Free collection that can be browsed like any other. The general principle transfers: where regulatory or tax status changes the buying decision, it belongs in the catalogue rather than in a policy page.
No. What we delivered is a responsive web platform that works across devices. We mention it because portfolio pages often imply native apps where none exist, and this is not one of those cases.
We are not listing a stack for this engagement, because we would rather say nothing than publish a list we cannot evidence to the same standard as the rest of this page. If the technology choices matter to your evaluation, ask us on a call and we will walk you through them properly.
A platform of this shape is a multi-month engagement, and the honest answer depends on how much of the pricing and compliance layer you need on day one. We scope it in a paid discovery sprint and give a fixed price and a fixed date after that — not before.
We are an engineering company in Lahore, Pakistan, working as an offshore delivery partner. Our working day overlaps the UK business day by most of the afternoon, which is why UK clients are a comfortable fit for us. We say this on the first screen rather than the last.
Tell us where your prices come from and how your customers buy. We will tell you which parts of this are reusable, which need building, and roughly what that costs — and if we are not the right fit, we will say so.