Doughboys

The situation

Doughboys Pizza Base Company supply restaurants, hotels, delis, and retailers across South Africa with hand-rolled, par-cooked frozen pizza bases - wheat, gluten-friendly, and low-carb cauliflower options. Now also direct to home cooks.

Their previous online setup ran on Ecwid. It worked, but it couldn't keep up with what the business actually needed: B2B wholesale accounts with tiered pricing, integration with cold-chain courier services, accounting sync, automatic invoicing for both retail and wholesale customers, and the kind of speed and SEO performance that wins searches for "pizza base supplier South Africa". The Lighthouse score sat around 40.

What they needed was a custom platform that fit the business - not a one-size-fits-all storefront.

What we built

We rebuilt the entire platform on Laravel 12 - a custom application built around thirteen separate modules that each handle one part of the operation.

A faster, mobile-first storefront. Redesigned and rebuilt from the ground up. Lighthouse score went from around 40 to 89+. The new site loads quickly on mobile (where most of the traffic is) and walks customers to products in far fewer clicks than the old setup.

A full set of South African payment options. PayFast for card, EFT, and Mobicred. Yoco for hosted card checkout. SnapScan and Zapper for QR payments. Customers pick whichever they prefer at checkout, and each one reconciles automatically.

MyCourier cold-chain integration. Frozen pizza bases need temperature-controlled couriers. Orders for frozen products automatically book a MyCourier collection with cold-chain handling flags. Tracking flows back to the customer without anyone having to manually update an order status.

A wholesale B2B layer. Restaurant and retail accounts get their own login, their own pricing tier, their own net-30 terms with automatic pro-forma invoicing. The order desk can also enter wholesale orders manually from a single back-office screen.

Xero accounting sync. Every order automatically creates a matching Xero invoice with the right VAT, the right customer, the right line items. No more month-end reconciliation by hand.

Cloud-printed invoices and labels. Orders trigger a print job to a PrintNode-connected printer at the warehouse. Pickers see the order and the address label without anyone having to email a PDF.

Targeted delivery-area landing pages. Each major delivery zone has its own SEO-optimised page so customers searching for "pizza base supplier Cape Town" or "frozen pizza base delivery Johannesburg" find Doughboys directly.

A food blog. Content that ranks for the things their customers and prospects actually search - recipes, pizza technique, base comparison guides - and that draws SEO traffic into the buying funnel.

Site-wide SEO work. Every product, every page, every category. Meta data, schema markup, internal linking structure, image optimisation, sitemap automation.

A back-office Filament admin panel. Order management with status workflow and audit trail, PDF invoice generation, address labels, courier booking, wholesale account management, discount codes, gift vouchers, analytics dashboard. Multi-role staff access with permissions and activity logging.

Marketing automation. Social scheduling, post timing based on audience behaviour, new ad creative and design work that targets specific customer segments rather than spraying to a generic audience.

Microsoft Clarity for CRO. Heat maps, session recordings, and behaviour analytics so we can see exactly what works and what doesn't and keep refining the user flow.

Upgraded hosting, CDN, and caching. Cloudflare R2 for media storage, proper edge caching, asset optimisation.

Monthly in-person check-ins. Visiting Doughboys in person each month to understand not just what they're asking for, but what they need next.

What changed

• Page speed. Lighthouse from ~40 to 89+. Faster pages convert better and rank better. Both matter.
• Operational reach. Wholesale customers, retail customers, and walk-in orders all flow through one system that talks to itself. The Xero sync alone saves hours every month.
• Search visibility. Targeted delivery-area pages and a food blog mean Doughboys now show up for the searches that matter to them, not just direct-traffic visitors.
• Cold-chain logistics that work. Frozen-product orders automatically book with MyCourier in the right way, every time. No manual courier dispatch, no temperature-control mistakes.

What it cost

Doughboys is a larger-scope engagement than what's published on the Services page. It's a custom Laravel build with a thirteen-module architecture, multiple third-party integrations, and ongoing partial management during the transition to full management.

For projects of this size we scope properly and quote individually - but the ongoing relationship sits in the same shape as the Strategic Retainer published on the Services page.

If you're looking at a build of this complexity - multiple payment gateways, B2B wholesale, accounting integration, courier integration, custom back-office - get in touch and we'll talk you through what your version would look like.

Who this fits

If you're running a product business that needs to talk to wholesale customers, retail customers, couriers, accounting software, and printers - and the off-the-shelf storefront tools have run out of room - this is the kind of build we'd structure for you.