About Metal Art Cafe
Metal Art Cafe makes custom house numbers and metal wall art in South Africa. The pieces are laser-cut from brushed stainless steel and powder-coated mild steel. The catalogue runs from nature and African-inspired designs to Bible verses, oversized clocks, wine racks, fire pits and furniture.
Most pieces can be personalised, and each one is made after the order comes in, which takes about two weeks.
Before Vitals: seven apps, seven bills
So the store needs a few things on the page. A wishlist. An Add to Cart button that stays in view. A cart that slides out instead of loading a new page. Payment logos, offers on products that go together, one clean way to check out, and recordings of how shoppers use the site.
On Shopify, each of those is usually a separate app. That’s seven apps for Metal Art Cafe, and every one of them comes with its own monthly bill, its own code loading on every page, its own dashboard and its own support team to email when something breaks.
We measured the load times in our own speed test on a sample product page, not on metalartcafe.co.za.
After Vitals: seven apps, one bill
Metal Art Cafe has been on Vitals since March 2025, and all seven of those apps now come with one Vitals plan at $29.99 a month. Each app is a switch in the Vitals dashboard, and turning another one on doesn’t mean installing anything or paying more.
Day to day, that means one bill, and one app loading code on each page instead of seven. Changes happen in one place, and there’s one support team to ask. The team also uses Claude, so with Vitals MCP connected they can ask Claude what the Visitor Replays recordings show instead of watching them one by one.
Where each app shows up on metalartcafe.co.za
Click a tab or a numbered marker to see where each app sits on the live store.
- Wishlist
A heart in the header and an Add to Wishlist button on every product let shoppers save a piece and come back to it. A house number or a large wall piece is rarely bought on the first visit.
- Sticky Add to Cart
The product name, price, chosen finish and an Add to Cart button stay pinned to the bottom of the screen while shoppers scroll through photos, sizes and materials.
- Hide Dynamic Checkout Buttons
Product pages show one Add to Cart button and no express checkout shortcuts, so every order goes through the cart, where shoppers see the full order before they pay.
- Payment Logos
Under the shipping and returns details, a row of logos shows the cards and wallets the store accepts, from Visa and Mastercard to Apple Pay and Google Pay.
- Cart Drawer
Adding a piece opens the cart from the side of the page instead of sending shoppers to a new one. They can change the quantity, see the total and keep browsing from where they were.
- Upsell Builder
Products that go together are offered together. On the Modern Tree of Life page, a firewood holder is 30% off with it, and the same offer shows up again in the cart.
- Visitor Replays
Shoppers never see this one. It records visits across the whole store, with heatmaps of where people click and the path they take from page to page, so the team can see where shoppers get stuck.
Apps Metal Art Cafe could replace next with one Vitals plan
Metal Art Cafe uses 7 of the 40+ apps in Vitals. Every other app is part of the same Vitals plan and sits in the same dashboard, ready to turn on.
Each one is a switch in the same dashboard. No new app, and no new bill.
