Retail and Fashion E-commerce 2015 WordPressWooCommerceAdvanced Custom FieldsPayPalRewards system plugin

Trinquets

Trinquets was an online store in Metro Manila selling curated boxes of women's fashion accessories on a monthly subscription — one box for a one-off purchase, or three at a lower price each. The branding was designed by Ms. Joanna Malinis, and my task was to build the ecommerce site faithfully to her brand identity guideline. I built it on WooCommerce with a custom 'Box Themes' post type so the owners could publish each month's photography, description, order deadline, and shipping date themselves, then added a points rewards system and rewrote the cart and checkout to enforce the store's rules. The store has since closed.

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Summary

Trinquets was an online store in Metro Manila selling curated boxes of women’s fashion accessories on a monthly subscription — one box for a one-off purchase, or three at a lower price each. The branding was designed by Ms. Joanna Malinis, and my task was to build the ecommerce site faithfully to her brand identity guideline. I built it on WooCommerce with a custom ‘Box Themes’ post type so the owners could publish each month’s photography, description, order deadline, and shipping date themselves, then added a points rewards system and rewrote the cart and checkout to enforce the store’s rules. The store has since closed.

Details

Trinquets had only two products to sell — a single box, and a three-box option — but the store had to look different every month. The branding, from the logo and typefaces to the color swatches and the product boxes, was designed by Ms. Joanna Malinis with a written brand identity guideline, and I built the site’s UI/UX to follow it. Rather than run a standard WooCommerce catalog, I created a custom ‘Box Themes’ post type, stripped the default editor down to only the panels the owners needed, and captured each month’s content in custom fields with Advanced Custom Fields. A custom Subscribe page template and a homepage template both read from whichever box theme is live, so publishing next month’s box means filling in a form and uploading two correctly sized images. A switch turns the box display off and shows a custom message and photo during the gap between the order deadline and shipping, when the store takes no orders.

The rewards system was the larger build. Buyers earn points for signing up, for a first purchase, for repeat purchases, and for social referrals, with a different point value for each action. Reward products are ordinary WooCommerce products that appear nowhere on the site except the member’s account page, and they can only be paid for with points. That, plus a rule that the cart may hold only one product at a time, required rewriting the checkout: custom functions keep only the last product added, check whether it is a box or a reward, and present PayPal or points as the appropriate payment method. Most of the points engine came from a commercial plugin, which avoided a lengthy and expensive custom build; I closed the remaining gaps by modifying the WooCommerce account pages to show the redeemable products and the member’s running balance.

Subscription commerce has a constraint ordinary stores do not: the product changes every month, and the people running the brand are usually not developers. A store like this only works when publishing next month’s box is a matter of filling in a form. I build WooCommerce and WordPress stores for small brands with merchandising rules, member perks, or checkout logic that off-the-shelf themes cannot handle — responsive builds the people running the shop can update themselves. If your store model does not fit a template, contact me about your WooCommerce store.