Lucky Duck & Swan Provisions

The problem

Fresh fish shipped overnight is priced by the box it travels in, the address it goes to and the day it has to land, and the card is charged before anything is packed. A flat shipping figure loses money on the parcel going far and overcharges the one going near. The old site was a brochure and a request form, so every sale ended in a phone call to work out the carriage, and a spreadsheet after it.

What got built

The checkout is four short pages: details, arrival day, shipping, card. The shipping step asks Shippo to rate the basket as the parcel it will actually be (the owner's own box, its empty weight, the weight of each item, plus his packing cost) for the chosen day, and lists every overnight service the carriers offer for it. Each price it shows is signed over the day, the service, the address and the parcel, so the figure the customer picked is the figure charged, never a second quote. On the order screen, one button buys the label for the service the customer paid for, and the tracking goes out by email when it ships. Around that, the trade route runs on the same product records with its own basket, and a build check fails if a wholesale price reaches any public page, link preview, structured data or the llms.txt.

Details worth naming

• Overnight shipping priced live at checkout for the customer's address, the arrival day they chose, and the box the order will really travel in.
• Every price shown is signed, so what the customer picked is what the card is charged, even when a carrier's second answer would differ.
• One button buys the label the customer already paid for, a packing slip prints without prices, and the tracking number is emailed on dispatch.
• The carriers' quirks handled in code: USPS will not rate more than six days out and UPS throttles, so both are worked around rather than dropping a service.
• A page, a link preview and structured data for every product, drawn from the same records the order desk edits, so a link texted to a chef arrives as the uni and its price rather than a logo.
• Trade accounts sign in by an emailed code and see their own prices; catch-weight orders are confirmed on the desk and invoiced through Stripe from the confirmed lines.