Rock Bottom Fireworks
fireworksnorthampton.co.uk: a WordPress and WooCommerce fireworks shop where customers reserve online and collect and pay in store, wired into the shop's own stock and order systems.
The brief
Rock Bottom in Northampton sells fireworks over the counter every autumn and wanted a dedicated website for bonfire night. Fireworks are not an ordinary product. They can only be sold to over 18s, only in the legal selling windows, and they have to be collected from the shop. The same stock is being sold at the till all day, so the website must never take a reservation for something that has already gone off the shelf, and the staff needed online orders to land in the systems they already use.
Why WordPress
Most of our builds are on Shopify or Orbit Commerce. This one is built on WordPress with WooCommerce, our first site on that platform, because it gave us full control over a checkout that reserves rather than sells, and a separate brand from the main Rock Bottom store. It is hosted alongside the shop's other systems.
What we built
Reserve online, pay when you collect
- Collection day and time slot chosen at checkout. Slots close when there is less than an hour's notice, and only legal selling days are offered.
- Buttons say what really happens: "Reserve for collection" and "Reserve, pay when you collect", so nobody expects a delivery.
- Uncollected reservations go back on sale automatically once the collection day ends, and both the customer and the shop are emailed.
Age checks built in
- An over 18 check when the site opens, which leaves the content readable for search engines.
- An 18+ declaration with date of birth at checkout, checked against the collection day.
- A Challenge 25 panel on every product and an ID reminder email on the morning of collection.
A shop people enjoy browsing
- 75 fireworks, 31 of them with the maker's own video under the photos. Videos that YouTube stops playing are removed automatically every day.
- A live "only 8 left" count, buy one get one free and multi-buy badges, and endless scroll on the category pages.
- 15 buying and safety guides with question and answer markup for Google, plus local shop details for Google Maps.
- Cookie consent and an unticked marketing opt-in, to keep within UK privacy rules.
Links into Rock Bottom's in-house systems
This is the part that makes the site work for the shop, not just look good.
- Live stock from the shop till. The site regularly reads the fireworks stock from the shop's till system and takes off anything reserved online but not yet paid for, so the shelf and the website always agree.
- Products straight from the till. Names, prices, descriptions and photos came straight from the till system, so the shop did not have to type the range in twice.
- Orders on the staff pick list. Each reservation appears on the shop's own staff order screen with everything the team needs to have it ready before the customer arrives.
- Emails that arrive. Confirmations, reminders and shop alerts are sent through a dedicated email service rather than the web server, so they land in the inbox.
Built with
WordPress, WooCommerce, a custom theme and plugin, and a connection to the shop's in-house systems.
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