A full-stack e-commerce and order management platform for Canada's leading custom promotional products manufacturer. Storefront, checkout, production pipeline, shipping, payments, accounting — all in one Laravel monolith.
Six Cent Press has been manufacturing custom promotional products in Vancouver since 2003 — pinback buttons in 14 sizes, enamel pins, fridge magnets, wearable magnets, mirrors, custom packaging, and a full line of DIY button-making equipment as Canada's number one Tecre supplier.
The platform handles the full lifecycle: a customer browsing buttons at midnight, uploading their artwork, paying with a credit card, and receiving a tracking number — all the way through to a producer in the shop pulling up the order, marking it through six production stages, and syncing the sale to their accounting software.
It's a Laravel monolith — storefront and admin in one codebase, Livewire for the interactive checkout flow, and deep integrations into payment processing, shipping carriers, sales tax calculation, and accounting. One deploy, one set of models, one source of truth.
The customer-facing storefront is a set of Livewire components that walk the buyer through a multi-step checkout: browse products, configure quantity and options, register or log in, enter shipping details, upload artwork, review, and pay. Every step is reactive — shipping costs update live based on destination and carrier, pricing brackets adjust as the quantity changes, promo codes apply instantly.
The product catalogue spans buttons (14 sizes, round and shaped), fridge magnets, wearable magnets, mirrors, custom packaging, enamel pins, DIY button presses, graphic punches, and button parts. Each category has its own quantity brackets, tiered pricing, and accounting system mappings. A customer ordering 250 buttons sees a different price per unit than one ordering 5,000 — and the correct bracket is resolved automatically in the cart.
Every product category has its own quantity brackets — buttons go from 10 to 20,000+ units, magnets from 100 to 10,000+, DIY from 1 to 25. The cart resolves the correct price per unit automatically and maps each bracket to the accounting system for seamless invoicing.
Customers upload their designs during checkout — PDFs, PNGs, AI files. Files go straight to cloud storage via secure upload URLs. Optional digital proof service adds a review step before production. Templates are available for customers who need a starting point.
Canada Post for domestic, FedEx for US and international, or customer pickup. Shipping costs calculated live from box dimensions, weight, and destination zone. Address validation per country. Tracking URLs generated automatically once the order ships.
Once an order lands, the admin dashboard takes over. Producers see incoming orders filtered by status, open them, review the artwork, assign the job to a production user, and move it through a six-stage pipeline: In Review, Printing, Die Cutting, Production, Quality Control, and Shipping. Every status change is logged with the user and timestamp, creating a full audit trail per order.
Customers can track their order at any time — a public tracking page (no login required) shows the current production stage, expected dates, and shipping info once the order is in transit. Status change emails go out automatically at key milestones.
Three roles — Admin, Manager, Producer — each with its own middleware and feature access. Admins manage users. Managers handle costs, promo codes, and production schedules. Producers focus on orders and customers. The right people see the right things.
Full customer profiles with order history, lifetime value, and internal notes. Search by company or name, create manual orders on behalf of a customer, view artwork across all their orders, and trigger password resets. Guest checkout supported alongside registered accounts.
The real complexity of this project isn't the UI — it's the integrations. Every order touches a payment gateway, a tax engine, at least one shipping carrier, and an accounting system. The trick is making all of them feel invisible to the customer and the producer.
Canadian payment processing with hosted tokenization — the credit card number never touches the server. Temporary tokens convert to permanent tokens for order processing. Supports Visa, MasterCard, and refund workflows from the admin panel.
Live rate calculation from box weight and destination. Domestic carrier for Canadian shipments, international carrier for US and overseas. Tracking number generation, address validation per country (CA vs US postal codes), and automatic tracking URL emails.
Sales tax calculated by province and state. Canadian GST/HST and US state sales tax resolved automatically at checkout based on the shipping destination. Tax amounts appear on the order and flow through to accounting with the correct tax codes.
OAuth-connected accounting integration. Every paid order creates an invoice with correct line items mapped to products by price bracket. Exchange rates for USD/CAD conversions. The bookkeeper never has to touch an order manually.
All customer artwork, product images, and packaging images stored in the cloud. Secure upload URLs so files go directly from the customer's browser to storage without passing through the app server. Separate collections for artwork, product images, and packaging.
Transactional email for order confirmations, shipping notifications, password resets, and status updates. Internal team notifications fire on every new order so the shop floor knows instantly when work is coming in.
Manager-created promo codes with active/inactive toggle, start/end dates, and usage tracking. Validated at checkout in real time — customers see the discount applied to their total instantly. Used count tracked per code for campaign analytics.
A production calendar with non-working days (holidays, closures) that feeds into delivery estimates. Managers set the schedule; the system uses it to calculate realistic due dates and flag rush orders that land on busy days.
Customers check their order status without logging in — the tracking page shows production stage, assigned producer, carrier, and tracking number once shipped. Links go straight into the confirmation email. No account required.
Live customer reviews pulled from the business listing and displayed on the site. Social media feed integration for the gallery. Both cached in the database so the page loads fast and doesn't depend on third-party uptime at render time.
Alongside the web frontend, the platform exposes a versioned REST API with token-based authentication. Customer registration, login, guest checkout, order creation, artwork upload, order listing, order detail, and public tracking — all available as JSON endpoints. The API was built to support future mobile apps and third-party integrations without rebuilding the business logic.
Built on Laravel with Livewire for the interactive checkout. Tailwind CSS for styling and fully tested with automated test suites. Custom integration packages for payment processing and cart management sit alongside the main application.
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