The situation
For three years, Love For Lobes ran the entire business on social media. Every order arrived as an Instagram DM or Facebook message. Sarah copied each one into a spreadsheet by hand, took payment manually, then chased the fulfilment in another tab. Nights and weekends gone.
She knew it wasn’t sustainable. She also knew that switching to a “real” ordering system always seemed too hard: products to set up, a checkout to configure, integrations to break, and somebody to argue with on the phone about why a SaaS tool didn’t do exactly what she needed.
So she’d put it off. For three years.
What I built
A custom ordering system on her own domain, built on WordPress with custom plugins, designed around the way Love For Lobes actually sells, not a generic e-commerce template.
- A product catalogue tailored to handmade variants (style, length, configuration) without the usual e-commerce noise.
- Stripe checkout, with payment, order confirmation, receipt and shipping details captured in one flow.
- An admin view that lists every order in one place, with the fulfilment status front and centre.
- Auto-generated customer emails, order confirmation, shipping notification, the small follow-ups Sarah used to write by hand.
The whole thing runs on Sarah’s accounts. No SaaS lock-in, no monthly per-product fees.
The outcome
The manual order pipeline is gone. Around 20 orders a week, sometimes more, come in, Sarah sees them in one place, and the customer gets the right emails without anyone touching the keyboard.
Sarah used to spend about an hour on every order. At 20-odd orders a week, that’s roughly 20 hours back. Every week. Most of a working week that used to disappear into copy-paste.
Three years of “I’ll get to it next month”, solved in one project.