Hi all,  I have a reasonable amount of experience in creating WordPress websites, plus I've made a couple of specific websites from scratch using html/css/js.

However, I'd like to build a website for a monthly subscription delivery service I'm thinking of launching, and I'm wondering whether it's possible just in WordPress with the right add-ons or if I'll need something more involved.  I'm willing to pay someone to do the bits I can't do if necessary.

The website will need to:

1. Advertise and describe the service (no problems with WordPress for this one!).
2. Allow customers to sign up for a monthly/3-month/annual subscription.
3. Take payment for the subscriptions (ideally through something like Stripe).
4. Let the customer choose from a set of categories (one or multiple) for their subscription, and update their preferences as necessary.
5. Ideally allow me to manage the catalogue of different items I have in stock for delivery each month (although this can be back-end only as the customer won't see this).
6. Each month, provide the customer with a random choice of 3 of the items in stock to choose from for delivery.

I think #6 will be hardest to implement... 

Looking forward to hearing your tips and suggestions!

Welcome to the forums.

I don't use WP but I'm sure the WP experts will give you an opinion soon.

I have built similar sites using ExpressionEngine so all the stuff you're looking for is possible.

You can but I wouldn’t.

You would need a custom theme/plugin which means you might just as well get the whole thing custom built.

Thanks for the advice. Roughly how much do you reckon it would cost to get something like that built?  I've only ever done everything myself before!  I could do all the graphics and write any copy, and once it's built I reckon I could maintain it and tweak the code if anything needed changing.

Anything from £1000 to £10,000

A developer would need a lot more information about the project before giving a quote.

I must admit to being a bit confused about how it works. If I pay you £10/month you offer me three random products from which I choose one. Does this mean everything you offer is worth exactly £10? Why do I have to choose each month? Why can’t I just get a blue widget delivered each month?

Welcome to WDF.

Was just going to say #6 isn't hard at all, MySQL has RAND(), something like;

SELECT * FROM `table_name` WHERE `qty` > 0 ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 3

... you could also narrow down by selected categories.

Thanks for being so welcoming everyone

The idea was to make a book subscription service whereby people pay £x/mth for a book to be delivered, alongside some other treats.  Having a random book each month would work, but I thought it would be nice to offer people a small amount of choice.  There are a bunch of existing similar box subscriptions out there.

I'm happy to give it a go myself before engaging professional help, but I'd like to make sure I'm at least heading out down the right path in terms of the best way to implement it all.

Sounds fun. Would be good for people to be able to log what they have? Just thinking of people who already have a lot of books in their categories of choice.

43 minutes ago, BrowserBugs said:

Sounds fun. Would be good for people to be able to log what they have? Just thinking of people who already have a lot of books in their categories of choice.

Good idea - you could do this with a no payment checkout:

- customer selects items they want then "adds to cart"
- customer then "checks out", if you have the customers delivery address (presumably gathered as part of account creation process) it could be whittled down to a simple order review page and a way to submit the order so it's easy and quick to complete
- orders are then stored in the DB so customers can see items they have previously selected
- admin has a record of what books each customer wants each month

On 4/5/2020 at 5:33 PM, BlueDreamer said:

Good idea - you could do this with a no payment checkout:

- customer selects items they want then "adds to cart"
- customer then "checks out", if you have the customers delivery address (presumably gathered as part of account creation process) it could be whittled down to a simple order review page and a way to submit the order so it's easy and quick to complete
- orders are then stored in the DB so customers can see items they have previously selected
- admin has a record of what books each customer wants each month

I'd be careful about re-using the address, often people want to gift things to others.  Be sensible to use the original address as an option at checkout but with the ability to input a different shipping address than billing.

I definitely wouldn't use WordPress for this.  Perhaps you use a CMS for managing bits of content like some of the landing pages.  Contentful would be a much better choice for this aspect that WordPress - you get JSON data from a REST or GraphQL endpoint and use that to populate the website with content.  The rest of it I'd build bespoke.  Personally I'd use NodeJS and AWS Lambda for this along with Dynamo DB but that's because I have some experience with those, but no reason why you couldn't use another language or database setup.

Done the way I suggest you have full control so can iterate with any features you choose and if your website gets busy this sort of setup can scale to millions of concurrent users.

1 hour ago, rbrtsmith said:

I'd be careful about re-using the address, often people want to gift things to others.  Be sensible to use the original address as an option at checkout but with the ability to input a different shipping address than billing.

I definitely wouldn't use WordPress for this.  Perhaps you use a CMS for managing bits of content like some of the landing pages.  Contentful would be a much better choice for this aspect that WordPress - you get JSON data from a REST or GraphQL endpoint and use that to populate the website with content.  The rest of it I'd build bespoke.  Personally I'd use NodeJS and AWS Lambda for this along with Dynamo DB but that's because I have some experience with those, but no reason why you couldn't use another language or database setup.

Done the way I suggest you have full control so can iterate with any features you choose and if your website gets busy this sort of setup can scale to millions of concurrent users.

I agree with the idea of using a CMS only to manage the content side, but have you used Contentful in a personal project? It's incredibly expensive for what it does, even at $40 a month you only get access to a REST API, a few field types, and a single user account. To get GraphQL you need the enterprise pricing which is thousands and to be honest doesn't justify the cost unless you're a business that makes heavy use of it.

 

11 hours ago, rbrtsmith said:

I'd be careful about re-using the address, often people want to gift things to others.  Be sensible to use the original address as an option at checkout but with the ability to input a different shipping address than billing

Yes broadly agree with that, it's something the OP will have to assess whether their customers might need different shipping address(es).

22 hours ago, Jack said:

I agree with the idea of using a CMS only to manage the content side, but have you used Contentful in a personal project? It's incredibly expensive for what it does, even at $40 a month you only get access to a REST API, a few field types, and a single user account. To get GraphQL you need the enterprise pricing which is thousands and to be honest doesn't justify the cost unless you're a business that makes heavy use of it.

 

I haven't but I know a few people using it for blogs and they use the basic package which is free, yes you get the REST API but it's pretty easy to create a service that takes the rest data and transforms it to GraphQL. or just use the REST endpoints on the frontend - REST with Contentful can't be any worse than WordPress surely?

If you're forced to use WP for cost reasons then I'd definitely recommend the OP only use it for content and use the REST API it provides as the alternative is just a spaghetti mess.

Edited April 8, 20206 yr by rbrtsmith

46 minutes ago, rbrtsmith said:

I haven't but I know a few people using it for blogs and they use the basic package which is free, yes you get the REST API but it's pretty easy to create a service that takes the rest data and transforms it to GraphQL. or just use the REST endpoints on the frontend - REST with Contentful can't be any worse than WordPress surely?

If you're forced to use WP for cost reasons then I'd definitely recommend the OP only use it for content and use the REST API it provides as the alternative is just a spaghetti mess.

I was just curious. I know a few alternatives exist already like Netlify CMS that are open source too.

It seems to be the way the CMS's are going, Craft are launching a hosted solution on a serverless infrastructure later this year, and the CMS already has GraphQL built in. If it works like I expect then it's something that really interests me. I have been waiting for something with that level of flexibility that I can hook into something like Next.js and not have to worry about hosting.

On 4/8/2020 at 10:17 AM, Jack said:

I was just curious. I know a few alternatives exist already like Netlify CMS that are open source too.

It seems to be the way the CMS's are going, Craft are launching a hosted solution on a serverless infrastructure later this year, and the CMS already has GraphQL built in. If it works like I expect then it's something that really interests me. I have been waiting for something with that level of flexibility that I can hook into something like Next.js and not have to worry about hosting.

Yeah that sounds promising, Craft seemed MUCH better than WordPress, if it's self hosted and just provides me with an API I wouldn't care that it's written in PHP,  I have no idea what Contentful is written in to be honest, it doesn't matter to me as long as I don't need to go near any PHP code 😂

I do similar with a personal finance app that I built, I went with Firebase so then I don't need to care about hosting the database.  The app itself is a Gatsby app (I just choose it because there's even less to configure than Next, but it all runs client side so I don't get SSR benefit, not that it matters in my case) that is hosted on Netlify, given it's a static asset I don't pay any hosting or database costs.  The whole thing is free.

 

Edited April 15, 20206 yr by rbrtsmith