Built by a research-supply store. For yours.

Torva started as our own problem

We run Arctic Lab Supply, a research-supply store in Anchorage, Alaska. Everything in Torva exists because we needed it there first.

That is worth saying plainly, because the alternative explanation — a software company that surveyed a market and picked a niche — would predict a very different product. It would not predict a gate you cannot turn off, or a product name generator, or a Mark paid button.

What is hard about running a store in this category

Payments were the first wall. In this category, card processing is hard to get and hard to keep, and most stores end up on pay-by-app: a customer sends money through Zelle, Cash App or Venmo, and somebody matches it to an order by hand.

Advertising was the second. Accounts get disabled over compound names and phrasing that appear on every site in the category, including the sites that are being careful.

Compliance was the third, and the worst, because it is the one where nobody will tell you the rules. There is no document that says which words a reviewer keys on, which product names get you declined, or what a policy page has to contain. You learn it by getting turned down and guessing at why.

And underneath all of it, software that did not fit. A general ecommerce platform has no idea what a certificate of analysis is, that a lot number matters, that a vial gets cheaper in tens, or that a product name can be the reason the account closes.

So we built the parts nobody sells

Not a storefront — plenty of those exist. The parts that were missing: the research-use and 21+ gate on entry and again at checkout. Product names in the code style processors accept. A pass that strips dosing and effect language out of every page a build writes. Policy pages drafted instead of left blank. Certificates attached to the product and the lot they belong to. Quantity pricing that matches how the category actually buys.

Then the daily work, because that was the other half of the problem: pay-by-app orders with QR codes and one-click confirmation, batch shipping labels, receipts and order emails, affiliates, and one place to see what happened.

Then other people asked for it

That is the part we did not plan. Store owners in the same category kept asking the same question — how are you handling the payments, the names, the policies — and the honest answer was a system we had built for ourselves that we could not hand over.

Torva is that system, rebuilt as something we can hand over. It is multi-tenant, it starts from your site rather than ours, and nothing in it is specific to our store.

We scan our own store and publish the score

The clearest way we know to show what Torva checks is to run it against Arctic Lab Supply and show you the output, including the parts that fail. Arctic Lab Supply is not built on Torva — it is a normal store on its own platform, which is exactly why its score is worth reading.

It scored 65 out of 100: 7 findings across 13 pages and 24 products. Every one of them is something a Torva build handles before you see the preview.