Gulbankian’s catalog naturally splits into two very different kinds of products: fresh, time-sensitive arrangements that only make sense as same-day local delivery or pickup, and shelf-stable items – plants, gift baskets, accessories, workshop and outing tickets – that don’t need a delivery date at all and could reasonably be sold to customers outside the local delivery radius.
The existing WooCommerce setup, like most florist sites, was built around a single assumption: every order gets a local delivery date. That made it awkward to sell the non-perishable side of the catalog to a wider audience, and it meant every checkout – regardless of what was actually in the cart – forced the same local-delivery logic on the customer.
Our Approach
Rather than bolt a shipping option onto the existing checkout, we rebuilt the fulfillment logic at the product level. Every product in the catalog now carries a fulfillment designation — local pickup/delivery, ships nationwide, or both — and that designation drives the entire customer journey:
1. Category and shop pages – Occasions, Sympathy & Funeral, Plants, Gifts, Apparel & Accessories – carry fulfillment filtering alongside the existing occasion and price filters, so shoppers can see at a glance what’s available to ship versus what’s local-only
2. Product pages switch between two distinct experiences: a delivery date and time-window picker with a pickup-or-delivery choice for local-only items, or a shipping-speed selector with an estimated arrival window for shippable items – no date commitment required for the latter
3. Checkout was rebuilt to handle mixed carts – a same-day local bouquet and a shippable gift basket in the same order – splitting them into clearly grouped sections, each with its own date/address, while still resolving to a single payment and a single order
Why It Matters
For a business like Gulbankian, this wasn’t a cosmetic refresh – it’s what let a fundamentally local florist start selling plants, gift baskets, and other non-perishable items to customers well outside the MetroWest delivery radius, without confusing local same-day customers or complicating fulfillment on the operations side. The same logic that shows a shopper the right form on the product page is what tells staff, on the order screen, whether an item needs a delivery slot or a shipping label.
