Coast Cakes: Custom Ecommerce & POS Integration

Client: Coast Cakes, Hibiscus Coast bakery
Services: Custom ecommerce development, POS integration, checkout optimisation

The challenge

Coast Cakes needed more than an online store bolted onto their existing business - they needed online and in-store ordering to actually work as one system. Off-the-shelf ecommerce platforms don't handle the specifics of a working bakery well: custom cake orders, corporate gifting, edible image products, and a physical point-of-sale that needed to reflect what was happening online in real time.

A generic template store would have meant two separate systems, manual reconciliation, and a checkout that didn't reflect how the business actually operated.

The solution

We built on a heavily customised CubeCart foundation (PHP 8, MySQL 8 - roughly 60% custom code at this point) rather than forcing the business into an off-the-shelf platform. This gave us the flexibility to build exactly what the business needed rather than working around what a template allowed.

The in-store side runs on a proper POS setup - Star WebPRNT receipt printing, mPOS payment terminal, and barcode scanning - all built to work in step with the online store rather than as a separate system bolted on afterwards.

Custom functionality

• Custom order software for made-to-order cakes and corporate gifting, handling specifications a standard ecommerce platform has no concept of
• Streamlined checkout rebuilt from the ground up to remove friction
• Email campaigns and abandoned cart recovery, tuned to actual customer behaviour rather than generic templates
• Edible image and corporate gift product handling, a genuinely unusual ecommerce requirement most platforms don't support out of the box

Results

Why it matters

This is the kind of project that shows the difference between "an ecommerce website" and an ecommerce system built around how a business actually runs. The bakery didn't need a nicer storefront - it needed its online and in-store operations to stop working against each other. That's what got built.