Luna Landings sells cloth products with a made-to-order model — customers specify what they want, it gets made, and then it ships. It's a fulfilment approach that works well for the business (no overstock, no guessing demand) but creates a challenge for eCommerce: the standard add-to-cart-and-checkout flow doesn't naturally accommodate products that don't exist yet.
The Challenge
The core problem was bridging the gap between what the customer sees on the website and what the production team needs to make the order. A customer choosing a made-to-order item needs to be able to specify their requirements clearly. The production team needs to receive those specifications in a usable format. And none of that should create extra admin in the middle.
There was also the shipping dimension. Luna Landings sell internationally — with the specific exception of the US market, which has FDA licensing requirements for certain cloth product types. The store needed to handle worldwide shipping correctly, applying the right rates by country and blocking orders from restricted markets.
The Solution
I built Luna Landings a WooCommerce store with a product configurator built into the purchase flow. For made-to-order items, customers select their specifications — dimensions, materials, options — and the configured details are captured as part of the order. When the order comes in, the work order is generated automatically with all the production specifications attached.
This eliminates the step where someone has to read a customer email, interpret what they want, and write it up for production. The customer does the specifying; the system does the formatting.
Shipping was configured with worldwide zones and country-specific rates, with the US blocked at checkout. Customers in restricted markets see a clear message explaining the limitation rather than getting through the checkout and hitting a problem at fulfilment.
The Results
The made-to-order model works cleanly online: customers know what they're getting, production knows what to make, and orders don't require manual interpretation between the two. The automatic work order generation has removed a step from the fulfilment process that was previously handled manually.
The worldwide shipping setup opened international markets without creating a fulfilment headache — rates are calculated correctly and restricted markets are handled automatically.
Luna Landings are a good example of building an eCommerce store around an unusual business model rather than trying to make the business fit a standard checkout template.