The problem
Ilario Caffè is a coffee roaster in Naples. Its old online shop ran on PrestaShop, and the owners wanted to move to WooCommerce with a new design, in Italian and English, without losing the catalogue. The people who manage the shop do not speak English, so the admin had to stay in Italian.
What I built
I moved the shop to WooCommerce and wrote a custom theme with the features the business needed.
- Catalogue migration — scripts that read the old PrestaShop catalogue, downloaded high-resolution images and imported 43 products into a category tree, plus 12 information pages.
- Two languages — Italian as main language and English under /en/ with Polylang, while a small must-use plugin keeps the admin in Italian.
- Shipping by real weight — a custom WooCommerce shipping method that prices each cart by weight and destination, using a rate table based on the roaster’s past Packlink PRO costs. I also wrote a direct Packlink PRO integration, because the official plugin pointed to a domain that no longer exists.
- Quantity discounts — per-product price tiers set in the product panel, shown under the price and applied in the cart.
- Newsletter — subscriber list in its own table, newsletters written and sent from WordPress.
- Customer accounts — login and sign-up with Google, a branded login page and a cookie banner with no external service.
- Help for the staff — a support page with 15 short guides on how to run the shop.
Built with
WordPress and WooCommerce, a custom theme built with Tailwind CSS and Vite, Polylang, PayPal and Stripe at checkout.
Why it was done this way
The client had chosen the home page of a commercial theme, built with WPBakery. Instead of rebuilding it, I wrote a small compatibility layer so those pages keep working under the new custom theme. The new site is built on a test space and replaces the old one only when it is ready.
