Signs & Stickers Reporting Portal

A busy WooCommerce shop generates a great deal of useful information and then, in practice, sits on it. Signs & Stickers could see their orders, but answering anything beyond that meant exporting a spreadsheet. Which customers were worth keeping close, where sales were actually coming from, who had genuinely agreed to be emailed: all reasonable questions, none of them answerable without an afternoon of work and a degree of guesswork. Their marketing consent was worse than locked away, because it was not really theirs at all.

We built a portal to sit alongside the shop rather than inside it. It is a custom Laravel application holding a read-only copy of the store, pulling every order, customer and marketing attribution record across through a purpose-built bridge and refreshing itself every fifteen minutes. The read-only part matters more than it sounds: because the portal never writes back, WooCommerce remains the single source of truth for trading, and the team can use the portal as hard as they like without any of it touching a live order. It currently holds around 9,200 orders and 7,500 customers, reconciled against the shop order by order so the numbers are not merely plausible but correct.

On top of that sit the things the shop could never do. A dashboard and reporting suite, RFM segmentation so customers can be grouped by how recently and how often they buy and what they are worth, a sales map by postcode area, a searchable order and customer history with the artwork files attached where they belong, and ad-spend and return tracking. Exports are logged and limited to the people who should have them, which is the sort of detail nobody asks for and everybody wants the first time a question is asked about who downloaded what.

The most valuable work was around consent. The business had been relying on a checkbox provided by their email platform, which meant two things: their permission data was owned by a third party, and customers were being passed across regardless of whether they had actually opted in. We replaced it with their own consent capture built into the checkout, recording each customer's decision, the exact wording they were shown at the time, and the moment they agreed, all held against the order itself. The portal is now the definitive record, with a consent log, a suppression list acting as a final fail-safe on every single export, and a full audit trail behind it.

Attribution got the same treatment. All of it now sits in one view, and where a sale's source genuinely cannot be proven the portal says so plainly instead of quietly attributing it to something. That sounds like a small thing and is not: a report that admits what it does not know is one a business can actually make decisions on, and a report that fills the gaps with assumptions is one that will eventually be believed and cost somebody money.

Phase 1 has been signed off and the portal is live at their own address. A second phase is in progress, covering transactional email and campaign marketing.