Eric:Barbier Online Shop

The Project

Eric:Barbier stands for premium men's grooming from Hamburg — with two barbershops and a range of high-quality grooming products. The existing online shop ran on WooCommerce and WordPress and was reaching its limits in terms of performance, maintainability and custom requirements. We rebuilt the shop from the ground up — as a custom-built commerce platform based on Laravel and Lunar, with a clean Filament back office instead of a tangle of plugins.

The Challenge

The WooCommerce shop had grown through plugins over the years: every new requirement meant another extension, with corresponding consequences for load time, security and update effort. Custom workflows — such as a lean guest checkout, a reworked product page, automated reorder emails or the integration of affiliate channels — could only be implemented with compromises. At the same time, years of magazine content including images and search engine rankings had to be preserved. The goal was a solution that gives the shop full creative and functional freedom while remaining GDPR-compliant, fast and maintainable in the long run.

Solution & Core Features

• Headless commerce with Lunar: products with variants, eight categories as well as tax and shipping logic for DE, AT and the EU, based on the Laravel-native e-commerce framework Lunar.
• Completely reworked product page: variant selection, image gallery, base-price display (e.g. €/100 ml), quantity selection and FAQs generated automatically from the product attributes (ingredients, scent, vegan/paraben-/silicone-free) — complemented by cross-selling with similar products, matching add-ons and sets.
• Advanced shop filtering: filter by category and price range plus sorting by bestsellers, price and newest — solved performantly at the database level and linked to GA4 e-commerce tracking.
• Passwordless checkout: guest customers order via a six-digit email code — no password management, with rate limiting to prevent abuse. Payment via Stripe (incl. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna) and PayPal, complemented by bank transfer.
• Customer account with order history & one-click reorder: customers see their previous orders and, with a single click, add all items of an earlier order back to the cart.
• Migrated magazine with product linking: numerous magazine articles were imported from WordPress including images and categories, old URLs redirected via 301, and every article linked to matching products — content and shop interlock seamlessly.
• Marketing automation: detection of abandoned carts with reminder emails (incl. cooldown), automated reorder reminders and win-back emails.
• Invoices & documents: automatic invoice numbers and PDF generation for invoice, delivery note, voucher and credit note.
• Affiliate & shopping feeds: Awin and Google Shopping integration including click tracking and product feeds.
• More than a shop: an integrated barbershop section with two locations and opening hours, job listings and a team section — all from a single system.

Technical Highlights

• Filament back office with analytics: order, product and discount management plus custom statistics dashboards — revenue by category, payment method, shipping zone and discount, average order value, returning-customer rate, bestsellers and top customers, complemented by dedicated analysis pages for reorder and cross-sell behaviour as well as abandoned carts.
• GDPR encryption: personal customer data is encrypted with CipherSweet and remains searchable through blind indexes.
• Performance: WebP images via AWS S3 and CDN, OPcache, static asset caching, targeted eager loading and database-side sorting logic.
• Multilingual & SEO: German and English, hreflang, JSON-LD structured data (Organization, Product, BarberShop, Article, Job, FAQ) and 301 redirects of the old WordPress URLs for a seamless migration without ranking losses.
• Quality: Pest tests, PHPStan/Larastan and a GitLab CI/CD pipeline with separate staging and production environments.

The Result

A plugin-driven WooCommerce shop became a lean, self-contained commerce platform that gives Eric:Barbier full control over presentation, processes and data. The reworked product page and advanced filters make the range easier to explore, order history and one-click reorder encourage repeat purchases, and the migrated magazine linked to products connects content marketing directly with sales. Sensitive customer data is encrypted, recurring tasks run automatically, and the Filament back office gives the team meaningful metrics at any time. Shop, magazine, jobs and barbershop presence are united in one maintainable system.