Ten Years, Three False Starts, and Almost $2 Million: The Story Behind Our New Website

I built the first Crab Place website myself in 1996. Shopping carts didn't exist yet. I sat up all night for several nights straight writing HTML, and when it was done, customers had to add up their own order totals on the confirmation page and send them to us. We'd double-check the math on our end and get their crabs on a truck.

It was crude, but it worked. And for the next decade we were actually ahead of almost everybody. We built our own checkout calendar so you could pick the exact day your seafood arrived. We wrote our own fulfillment software so orders were organized by ship date instead of order date. In the early 2000s, nobody else selling food online could do what we could do.

Then the world caught up. The big mainstream shopping platforms passed us on the basics, but none of them could handle the things that make shipping live seafood different from shipping a t-shirt. Our old site wasn't mobile friendly, and more of you were shopping on your phones every year. By around 2015 we knew we had to rebuild from scratch.

That decision kicked off ten of the hardest years in this company's history.

The first attempt

We hired a professional agency, because that's what you're supposed to do when you're a seafood company and not a software company. The build cost us close to $200,000, ran over budget, and ran past every deadline. We launched anyway.

Thirty days later we shut it down and rolled back to the old site.

Customers were hitting bugs everywhere. Features that had worked for years didn't work at all. Orders were flowing into our warehouse with errors, which meant we were making mistakes on your deliveries. You were telling us loud and clear that the new site was worse than the old one, and you were right. Walking away from that much money hurt. Keeping a site that was failing our customers would have hurt more.

The second attempt

A few years later we tried again with a different company. This time we spent about $250,000, and we let the experts pick the platform, figuring they knew better than we did.

That site never launched. Not even for a day. The platform they chose simply couldn't be bent to do what our business needs, and no amount of money was going to change that. We walked away again.

The third attempt

The third build was the biggest of all. It started in 2023, was supposed to take a fraction of the time it took, and cost us well into the six figures. It finally went live in October of 2025.

If you shopped with us in the months after that launch, you probably felt it. Errors in checkout. Pain points we kept patching. Frustration we could see in your emails and hear on your phone calls. We kept the site up this time and worked through the problems one by one, but I won't pretend it was a smooth ride, because it wasn't. To everyone who stuck with us through that stretch: thank you. We noticed, and we didn't take it for granted.

What it added up to

Between the three builds and a decade of managing them, coordinating with them, and cleaning up after them, we spent close to two million dollars trying to get a working website. That's real money for a family seafood business in Crisfield, Maryland. I'd love to have it back.

But I'm not writing this to point fingers. Every one of those decisions was mine. The honest lesson is that nobody outside your walls can care about your customers the way you do, and something always gets lost when you have to translate 30 years of crab knowledge to people who have never packed a bushel. We did the best we could with the information we had at the time. You live and you learn.

Bringing it home

Earlier this year, we finally did what we probably should have done all along: we took the work back in-house.

That's how this company started. I'm a seafood guy with an IT background, and building our own tools was what made us cutting edge in the first place. Getting back to that has honestly given us our mojo back, as my brother puts it. Today the site is built and maintained by us: me, my cousin George, a small team, and the people who answer your calls and pack your boxes testing every change and telling us what's working.

The difference has been night and day. Very little remains of what we paid all that money for. The checkout errors that plagued us are largely gone, and more customers are making it through checkout smoothly than at any point in our history. For the first time in ten years, the website finally looks and works the way we always pictured it. That's it in the picture at the top of this page.

What's next

I'll keep the specifics to myself for now, but I'll say this: we're just getting started. There's a lot coming over the next year that we think you're going to love, and for the first time in a decade, we have full control over how fast we get it to you.

Thirty years ago I stayed up all night building a website so we could ship Maryland crabs to your door. It took a long, expensive road to get back to that feeling. We're glad you're here for it.

Greg Cain is the founder of CrabPlace.com in Crisfield, Maryland.