A marketplace for craft products
A platform where each producer is a separate brand with its own story, and retail buyers and wholesale customers work on one site at different prices. For this project we built what standard WooCommerce can't do: a wholesale account, discount tiers, SMS scenarios and order management like in a CRM.
Friga.ua is not an ordinary online store, but a platform for dozens of small producers from Zakarpattia. Here they sell buffalo-milk cheeses, honey, sausages, spices, jams — products that people choose not by price, but by WHO made them. So the main difference from an ordinary store: the producer here is as important as the product.
The second difference is two types of buyers at the same time. A retail customer takes one jar of honey, while a café or shop buys by the crate at different prices. Both scenarios live on one site, but see different prices and different terms.
The platform was chosen as WooCommerce — that was the client's wish. Everything described below was built on top of it for the platform's specific tasks: a standard store can't do this.
Room for growth was built in separately: the site was made from the start so that new producers, categories and sales scenarios can be added without reworking the foundation.
What was needed
A platform for dozens of producers that serves retail buyers and wholesale customers at the same time — and that managers, not programmers, run every day.
- Show each producer as a separate brand with a story, not just a label on a product
- Sell both retail and wholesale — to cafés, shops, establishments — at different prices and terms
- Give regular buyers discounts that grow with their purchases
- Create new entry points from search without a developer
- Keep in touch with the customer via SMS — from order status to bringing them back for a repeat purchase
- Checkout without registration and long forms
- Fast order handling by a manager: assemble, change, create manually, ship
What we did
WooCommerce was taken as the foundation, and all of the platform's logic was built separately for these tasks.
- Full brand pages: the producer's story, city of origin, their own filters and a selection of their products
- SEO collections: a manager assembles a page by any product attribute (for example, "aged cheese") — the result is a separate page with its own title and description, one more entry point from Google
- A wholesale account for cafés, shops and establishments — with their own prices and bonus tiers
- A customer account with a multi-level discount system: the more a customer buys, the better the terms
- An SMS system: both order notifications and remarketing by scenarios — reminders depending on what the person did on the site
- Site login by SMS code or via Google — without passwords
- Banner management: promotions on the home page change in a minute, without a developer
- Single-page checkout with a minimum of fields
- A completely reworked order page for the manager: the order contents change on the fly, orders (retail and wholesale) are created manually as in a CRM
- Automatic creation of a Nova Poshta waybill, the number goes to the customer by SMS right away