The situation
A multi-site bakery group in Northern Ireland already ran its daily operations on an internal system I'd built (see the operations platform case study). Celebration cakes were ordered by phone or in the shop, and staff entered each order into that system by hand.
The cost of the old way
Every cake order was taken down once and typed in again: size, type, message, icing colour, collection shop, date and time. Any detail could be entered incorrectly. And orders could only be taken while someone was there to answer the phone.
What I built
- A cake ordering page on the bakery website. Customers pick a size and type, choose a design from the gallery or upload their own picture, and add a message.
- Payment in full through Stripe before the order is accepted.
- The order goes directly into the bakery's existing system, to the right collection shop. It sits in the same queue as orders taken over the counter.
- The bakery's real rules, enforced at checkout: no Sunday collections, order deadlines for each day, opening hours, and dates when writing cakes aren't available.
- One menu, kept in one place. The cake menu and gallery come from the bakery's system, so they're only ever updated there.
- Safeguards so a paid order is never lost or duplicated. If the bakery system is briefly unreachable, the order is retried automatically. A repeated payment confirmation never creates a second order.
- A sales report in the bakery's admin showing website orders separately from orders taken by staff.