The problem
A laundry and dry-cleaning service in Rome wanted customers to order online and have their clothes collected and returned at home. Behind that simple promise sit many moving parts: a price per garment, the areas actually served, pickup and delivery slots, holidays, partner laundries and drivers. A standard online shop does not handle that kind of logistics.
What I built
I built a custom ordering platform with a public site and a full back office.
- Online “washing machine” — customers fill it from the home page by choosing category, service and quantity, and always see the running cost.
- Checkout with coverage check — the system checks the postcode against the list of served postcodes, then offers the available pickup and delivery dates with time slots. Extras such as urgent service, discount bonus and invoice are added here.
- Calendar rules — working days, public holidays, special openings and closures, and time slots that can be enabled separately for pickup and for delivery.
- Three ways to pay — credit card through PayPal, bank transfer or cash on delivery.
- Partner laundries and operators — each partner laundry has its own price list, with the public price next to the laundry’s price. Staff assign the garments of an order to a laundry and the order to an operator.
- Customer accounts — registration with account activation, a profile area and Facebook login.
- Back office tools — dashboard with charts, customers, price list, discounts, delivery costs and an email mailing tool.
Built with
Classic ASP with a SQL Server database, jQuery, small PHP scripts for the PayPal payment notification and Facebook login, and the dompdf and html2pdf libraries.
Why it was done this way
The business name, page title, PayPal account and served postcodes are settings in the back office, not hard-coded. That let the same code run a twin service in Naples: only the configuration changes from one city to the other.
