Ember Trees needed a full production commerce platform in a category where most of the normal playbook doesn't apply: no Google Shopping, no Meta or Google ads for the product itself, and a payments/compliance surface that has to handle age verification, identity checks, and state-by-state shipping eligibility correctly on every order.
We built the platform end to end: a React/Vite frontend with server-side rendering, an Express backend, Postgres via Drizzle ORM, deployed on AWS. On top of the commerce layer sits a genuinely deep SEO and AI-search infrastructure: a split sitemap architecture (static, product, blog, location, and certificate-of-analysis sub-sitemaps), per-page-type structured data (JSON-LD) across every page type from products to FAQs to job postings, an AEO layer (llms.txt, ai.txt, allow-listing major AI crawlers) so the site is legible to AI answer engines and not just search crawlers, and IndexNow integration for instant reindexing on content changes.
The location-page system alone covers 700+ programmatic state and city pages, each built to carry real per-location detail rather than a template with the city name swapped — the same anti-thin-content discipline we now apply to this site's own location pages.
With paid acquisition largely closed off in this category, organic and AI-search visibility isn't a nice-to-have — it's close to the whole growth channel.