We built MoonShine Ceramics’ website from the ground up. Developing a fully functioning e-commerce platform that serves hundreds of customers! Read on to see how we did it!
Required Features
MoonShine Ceramics is a relative complex e-commerce website, even though you might not be able to tell on the surface. Here is a short list of some of the more intricate features of the site that required special attention:
- Multiple payment gateways
- Multiple Shipping Options
- Dynamic Sales Tax Tables
- Gift Card Functionality
- MailChimp Newsletter Integration
- Facebook/Instagram Integrations
- Shippo Shipping Solution Integration
- Coupons and Sales Options (i.e. BOGOs, free shipping, etc.)
- Quickview Functionality
- Landing Page Function with Carrd.co
As you can imagine, implementing all of these features leads to a ton of backend development to ensure that frontend users have an easy time of making transaction and backend administrators have an easy time managing their store! What makes MoonShine Ceramics’ website especially unique is that Morgan Greenhaw (the artist creating all of the beautiful pottery on the website) releases inventory and sells collections all at one time. As a result, thousands of users hop on to her website in the hopes of snagging a super cool mug all at one time. The surge in traffic can cause a ton of work for a server, so we had to be sure that the systems we used could handle the load. So, how did we serve all of these functions without any problems?
Solutions and Implementation
There are so many e-commerce platforms out there. For artists, one popular option is Etsy. This platform is a great, sustainable option for artists that don’t have the time or money to invest in other e-commerce solutions. MoonShine Ceramics actually started out on Etsy in their early years! Anther popular option that we think is pretty rad and user-friendly is Shopify. This platform can make launching an e-commerce store simple and cost-effective for introductory stores. While we know the ease of both Etsy and Shopify, we decided to use WooCommerce to build MoonShine Ceramics!
WooCommerce–in our opinion–allows us to keep the creative door WIDE open when it comes to retaining a stellar brand representation. WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress (the world’s leading Content Management System powering about 30% of all websites on the web today). Perhaps the best part of WooCommerce is that it is 100% FREE!! This means if you already have a blog or website built on WordPress, you can add e-commerce functionality without any additional cost.
The real reason that we love WooCommerce, however, is that we can manipulate the software to perform however we want using pre-existing plugins/extensions or custom coding. Below are a list of a few plugins/extensions that we used to power MoonShine Ceramics:
- Advanced Custom Fields Pro (one of our absolute favorite WordPress plugins for every website)
- Shippo API Extension
- WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing (for cool sales functions)
- Square Payment Gateway
- PayPal Payment Gateway
- WP Rocket Caching Plugin (our highest recommendation for making sure your site runs fast)
- Flywheel Hosting (sidenote: they have the most fun support staff in the world)
In addition to these plugins/extensions/technologies, we also worked with our super-rad hosting provider, Flywheel, to ensure that the site had enough PHP workers (for a fun read on what this is and why its important, check out this post) to handle thousands of users attempting to make transactions simultaneously. All of these pieces of technology allowed us to create robust e-commerce website that delivers results month-after-month for MoonShine Ceramics. Head on over to their website to explore our work in the wild! Thanks for reading!