Lick, Stick, Shop
October 9th, 2024 by Gage Pacifera
When it comes to building ecommerce sites, Harmonic Northwest has amassed quite a nice selection of platform options to choose from that we have built sites on in the past including Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, Square and more. This breadth of hands-on experience is helpful for making sure we pick the best-fit ecommerce platform for the project and avoid wasting time, energy and money auditioning services that ultimately aren’t a good match. This experience was a big help in figuring out an ecommerce solution for a unique project that was brought to us by accomplished ideasmith and Plazm creative director Josh Berger.
Josh and his business partner Nico Courtelis are co-founders of The Portland Stamp Company and are in the business of reviving the somewhat forgotten art of poster stamps. They specialize in producing sheets of custom stamps to be used for celebrating special occasions (think weddings or births), promoting events or just good ol’ embellishment. You can have them help you design special stamps, upload your own artwork for them to print or purchase some blank sheets in bulk to print or draw your own art on them.
The two were interested in putting together an ecommerce site for the business that would be tightly integrated into a WordPress site. Having a long history of working with Josh on a number of other great projects (see: Fort George Brewery, DMS Architects, studioriley), we quickly agreed to help out. Josh provided some designs and then we dove right into the build.
WordPress Integration
The website needed to have a trove of information about poster stamps, an easily updatable gallery and a section showcasing the talented featured artists they work with. The site would also need to have a number of content modules that could be used flexibly across the site.
On the ecommerce side, they needed to offer a guided experience to their customers that would allow them to go through a sequence of steps to input all of the information and assets needed to produce a customized sheet of stamps.
These requirements pointed to WordPress being a good solution. WordPress’ flexible and easy-to-use CMS system could handle the informational content and some specialized plugins would allow us to put the pieces in place to do the ecommerce part and customize the shopping experience.
Configurable Products with File Upload
The focal point of the ecommerce experience was giving the customers the ability to order custom stamps using their own artwork. There were a few challenges that stood out here, namely:
- Creating a multi-step checkout process to allow a customer to upload information and assets
- Handling individual pricing on the 90 or so product configurations stemming from four different selectable options
- Allowing users to attach artwork to an order
In the end we used a combination of plugins and custom code to create the experience Josh and co. were looking for, and it all came together very nicely.
Dynamic Visualizations
Another feature that really makes this site special is the stamp visualizer. A user can upload their artwork to the site through their web browser and instantly see what that artwork will look like placed onto a sheet of perforated stamps. The tool allows the user to choose which stamp sheet to use, select page orientation and to choose a custom background color, and then it updates the product preview in real time. It’s fun to use and seeing the finished product has surely inspired some to become self-styled stamp makers.
Other features
There were a number of other useful and notable features we added to the site including an integration to Shipstation, Stripe payment processing, category-based filtering for purchasable pre-printed stamps, cross linking to buyolympia, optimizing email deliverability for the order notifications and adding tagging for SEO.
Go Get Your Stamps!
You can check out the site and create your very own customized poster stamps at: