Commerce hub
One WooCommerce catalog for merch, programs, courses, and events — plus native installments with auto-retries.
Case study
Five disconnected payment tools, one WooCommerce hub — tax, receipts, and inventory for a national aviation non-profit.
WordPressWooCommerceStripeSquareQuickBooks
01 — Overview
One backbone for live commerce
Elevate Aviation (Edmonton) sells merch, programs, courses, and events. I unified those into WooCommerce so tax, receipts, installments, and accounting share one order pipeline.
System map
02 — Problem
Five systems, zero conversation
01
Five silos: legacy payment plans, a separate Stripe account, Square events, WooCommerce merch, and manual invoicing.
02
Auditors flagged invoices with no GST/HST line items.
03
Receipts, inventory, and accounting were all done by hand.
03 — Solution
One WooCommerce hub
Merch, programs, courses, and events in one catalog. Native installments replaced the legacy payment-plan tool.
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Five payment tools | Single WooCommerce hub |
| Missing GST/HST on invoices | Province-aware tax lines |
| Manual receipts & inventory | Auto receipts + Square sync |
| No accounting link | QuickBooks invoice sync |
04 — My work
Contributions
Tax engine
Fixed a display-only “missing tax” bug, audited real collections, and rebuilt province + event-location tax config.
Stripe reliability
Restored receipts on 140+ orders and fixed a production signing-secret mismatch silently dropping webhooks.
Registration flows
Self-serve checkout and an application-gated path (Gravity Forms → approval → WooCommerce) on the same stack.
Coordinator plugin
Custom plugin emails staff on each registration and logs every send as an order note.
Integrations
Square two-way inventory (verified via API logs) and QuickBooks Online via MyWorks, with a staging-first workflow.
05 — Challenges
What was hard
01
Live order data
Staging and production could not be merged. Fixes were verified on staging, then rebuilt by hand on production.
02
Silent payment failures
Receipts and Stripe webhooks failed with no customer-facing error — webhook versions, duplicate endpoints, and a bad signing secret.
03
Tax that looked broken
Missing GST/HST lines were often a display bug. Historical exports proved what was actually collected.
06 — Outcome
Results
01
One hub
5+ payment systems → one WooCommerce install.
02
Tax compliance
Automated GST/HST across active provinces.
03
Auto receipts
Receipts on every charge, including installments.
04
Live inventory
Square ↔ WooCommerce two-way sync.
05
Payment bugs
Two live Stripe / receipt failures fixed.
06
Staff handoff
Coordinator notifications with an audit trail.
07 — Learnings
What I took away
01
Payment webhooks need observability — silent receipt failures only surface via staff or auditors.
02
A missing tax line is not always a calculation bug. Export the orders before rewriting config.
03
Live commerce databases cannot be merged. Staging-first, then hand-replay on production.
Get in touch
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payment systems unstuck?
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