Doughboys

The situation

Dough Boys Pizza Base Company is a Cape Town maker of frozen sourdough and other pizza bases. They sell to home cooks through their online shop and wholesale to restaurants and distributors.

Their shop ran on Ecwid. It handled simple retail orders, but the rest of the business lived around it: wholesale customers on their own prices and terms, orders taken over the phone and at the counter, invoices typed into the accounting system by hand, and frozen deliveries that needed a courier booked for every order.

They needed one system that handled all of it, not another storefront.

What we built

A custom platform on Laravel, live at doughboys.co.za: a public shop for retail customers and a back office for the team, built in separate modules so it keeps growing with the business. It is built for Doughboys, and built so the pieces can be reused.

One order system for every channel. Website orders, wholesale orders, phone orders and counter sales all land in the same place, with the same order workflow and audit trail, and every one is invoiced into Xero automatically, with payments synced back.

A shop built for frozen food. Products with variants and dietary tags, guest or account checkout, coupons and gift vouchers, VAT-inclusive pricing throughout, and delivery by area or collection with booked time slots. Frozen orders go nationwide by courier, and customers can track their order from their account.

South African payments. Yoco is the main card checkout, with iKhokha pay links, PayFast, SnapScan and Zapper alongside, and EFT on account for wholesale customers.

Wholesale that runs itself. Wholesale customers get their own accounts with price groups and per-account special prices, buy on 30-day terms, and can place bulk purchase orders that are invoiced in parts as stock goes out.

Courier booking from the order screen. The team books the frozen courier through CourierMate without leaving the order: town lookup, waybill labels and tracking, all from one screen.

A counter till. The same system runs the point of sale in the shop, with printed receipts, so counter sales and stock sit with everything else.

Checkouts that come back. When a customer starts paying and does not finish, they get a reminder email with a secure link to pick up where they left off. The link expires on its own.

Alerts where the team already is. New orders and anything that needs attention go to the team on Telegram, with a look-ahead of the next day's dispatches every night at midnight.

The back office. A kitchen display, PDF invoices and labels, manual order entry, an analytics dashboard, a content editor for the website, and staff roles so everyone sees what they need.

Found on Google. Ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics, a Google Merchant Center product feed with product schema, and Google Reviews on the site. All 32 product links from the old Ecwid store redirect to their new pages, so nothing that was already ranking was lost.

How it came together

• 25 February 2026 - first commit.
• May - the back office, Yoco payments and customer accounts.
• July - live payments and CourierMate courier booking.
• August - the counter till.
• September - a full walkthrough with the Doughboys team.
• 7 October 2026 - live, after the cutover from Ecwid the day before.
• October - wholesale self-service, Telegram alerts, and more till and bulk-order features in the weeks after launch.

459 commits over eight months, checked by about 1,800 automated tests that run before every release.

What changed

• One system instead of several. Web, wholesale, phone and counter orders all go through the same order system.
• No more invoice typing. Every order is invoiced into Xero automatically, VAT-inclusive, with payments synced back.
• Nothing lost in the move. All 32 old product links redirect to the new pages.
• Wholesale on its own terms. Price groups, special prices, 30-day accounts and part-invoiced bulk orders, without spreadsheets.
• Changes ship safely. About 1,800 automated tests run before every update goes live.

Who this fits

If you sell to the public and to trade customers, take orders in more than one place, and spend too much time re-typing orders into your accounting system or booking couriers by hand, this is the kind of system we build. It starts with a conversation about how your orders actually flow.