Embroidery Blanks

The problem

WooCommerce and Elementor were built for a different business. Most of our sales happen on WhatsApp. Some customers have no e-mail address at all. Every product comes in any of our binding colours, and the binding stock is shared across all products. Deliveries go to Pudo lockers, not street addresses. Each of those meant another plugin or another workaround.

What I built

A Laravel 13 API on PostgreSQL with a Vue 3 + TypeScript storefront and admin, in English and Afrikaans:

• Accounts with just a cellphone number. Password resets for those customers go through the admin or WhatsApp.
• In the admin, every order can send a pre-filled WhatsApp message: order status, payment reminder or shipped. A full WhatsApp Business API integration, so WhatsApp orders land in the system too, is in progress.
• Checkout built around Pudo lockers, with card payments through iKhokha and EFT, both behind one payment-gateway interface.
• Invoices and packing slips as PDFs, and a rich-text editor for the shop’s own pages.
• An importer that moved products, customers, orders and settings out of WordPress and writes a report of what it did. It can run again safely.

The hard part

This is the first system I own from the screen to the server, and I am also its main user. The trickiest pieces were the stock logic for bindings that every product shares, and fitting WhatsApp into the order flow without losing track of anything.

I also simplified the business itself along the way: fewer manual steps between a WhatsApp message and a packed order.