Case study · InkJet World · Maynooth, Co. Kildare
You can't put "a poster" in a shopping cart.
Print has no fixed product. The price depends on size, material, quantity, finish, page count and how many of those pages are colour. Some jobs can be sold from a shelf; others don't have a price until someone has understood them. We designed and built the shop that holds both — for a print business in a Kildare university town — and we still support it.
- Client
- InkJet World, Maynooth
- Sector
- Print & retail · Irish SME
- Services
- Experience Design · Digital Commerce · Support
- Catalogue
- ~45 product types, five categories
- Status
- Built from scratch, supported and enhanced
A counter business, and everything the counter did.
InkJet World is a print and design business on Mill Street in Maynooth. Someone walks in, describes what they need, and a person works out what's possible and what it costs. That conversation is the product — and it's the thing a website has to either replace or deliberately preserve.
The catalogue is enormous for a business this size. Business cards, letterheads, roll-up banners, restaurant menus, ID cards, stickers, snow globes, canvas prints, embroidery, work shirts, hi-vis vests, inks and toners, architectural drawings, fine art prints, memorial cards, thesis binding. Around forty-five distinct product types across five categories, most of them configurable.
And almost none of them have a single price. A thesis is priced on page count and how many of those pages are colour. Architectural drawings depend on size. A banner depends on material and finish. Putting one fixed number next to any of that is either wrong or unprofitable.
The temptation with a catalogue like this is to force everything into a cart, because a cart is what an online shop has. That would have quietly lost the highest-value work — the jobs that need a conversation before they need a price.
Three problems a template shop can't solve.
Any theme will give you a catalogue and a checkout. None of them decide which of your products belong in it.
Most people ordering print have a rough idea, a deadline, and no vocabulary for paper weights or finishes. The configuration has to guide someone to a good decision without requiring them to already know the answer.
Irish shoppers expect the number they see to be the number they pay. Tax-inclusive pricing that moves as options are chosen, with nothing appearing at the last step — otherwise the checkout becomes the place trust is lost.
A construction firm buying hi-vis, a student binding a thesis, an architect printing plans, a family ordering memorial cards. Same shop, same checkout, entirely different needs and states of mind.
A shop that knows what it can't sell by itself.
The structural decisions came before the design work, because on a catalogue this varied the structure is the design work.
Every product was assessed for whether it could be honestly priced without a conversation. Straightforward jobs go through the cart. Complex ones offer an enquiry instead — name, contact, and what you're trying to do — so the highest-value work reaches a person rather than bouncing off a checkout that couldn't quote it.
- Self-serve where the price is genuinely knowable up front
- An enquiry route on the product page itself for jobs that need scoping
- Neither treated as the lesser path — an enquiry is a lead, not a failed sale
Not the order they sit in the supplier's system. Someone ordering thesis binding thinks about page count before cover material, and the price updates as they go — tax included — so nothing changes when they reach the checkout.
- Variable pricing driven by the choices that actually change cost
- Tax-inclusive throughout, with a visible range before options are chosen
- Plain language rather than trade terms nobody outside print uses
- Free delivery threshold stated up front, not discovered at the end
Almost nobody orders business cards once. The account layer turns a transaction into a relationship — saved artwork, previous orders, order tracking and a wishlist — so the second order takes a minute rather than starting from nothing.
- Saved designs, so reordering doesn't mean re-uploading
- Order history and tracking — print has a lead time, and people check
- Wishlist and comparison for people specifying before they buy
- Fewer "can you send my file again" calls into the shop
Five categories, because there are five kinds of customer.
The catalogue isn't organised the way a printer thinks about presses. It's organised the way customers arrive — and one of those categories exists purely because of where the shop is.
Cards, letterheads, banners, menus, signage, branded items. The everyday commercial work.
Work shirts, hi-vis, embroidery, school hoodies. Bought by organisations, not individuals.
Straightforward physical goods. The only genuinely conventional part of the catalogue.
Fine art, architectural drawings, memorial cards. Small volume, high care, mostly scoped.
A whole top-level category for one product — because Maynooth is a university town.
Thesis Center only makes sense if you know the shop is minutes from Maynooth University. It's one product given the same billing as thirty-seven — because for a few weeks a year it's the busiest thing in the building.
One shop, four very different people.
A supermarket sells to one kind of shopper in roughly one kind of mood. This shop doesn't. The same checkout serves a student who left the thesis until Tuesday, a family choosing memorial cards, a site manager restocking hi-vis, and an architect who needs drawings by lunchtime.
Designing one experience for all four is the actual problem — and the answer isn't a single tone that averages them out. It's letting each route feel appropriate while sharing one system underneath.
Memorial cards sit in the same catalogue as snow globes. That route is deliberately plain, doesn't suggest related products and doesn't ask anyone to compare options. It's the clearest example of design as restraint on this project.
Deadline pressure and a small budget. Page count in, price out, order placed at two in the morning without needing anyone to be awake. Speed and certainty matter more than anything else here.
A site manager buying hi-vis wants exactly what they bought last time. Saved designs, order history and a short path to repeat — no browsing, no reconsidering.
Architects and photographers care about sizes, materials and line quality. They get real specification detail and a comparison tool, because for them the choice genuinely is technical.
Started at the counter.
The most useful research on this project wasn't a survey. It was understanding what happens when someone walks in and says "I need something printed."
Which questions staff ask, in what order, and where a job stops being standard. That conversation became the structure of the product pages.
Every product assessed for whether it could be priced honestly online. That single decision shaped the whole shop and protected the high-value work from a checkout that couldn't quote it.
Options sequenced the way someone decides them, in plain language, with the price moving as they choose and tax included throughout.
Accounts, saved artwork, order history and tracking — the parts that make the second order easy and take routine calls away from the shop.
Still ours. New products, seasonal ranges, pricing changes and platform maintenance delivered as ongoing work rather than a project each time.
A catalogue this size is never finished.
Forty-five product types means new lines every season, prices that move with paper costs, and a Christmas range that has to be up in October. A shop like this doesn't get built once — it gets tended.
We're still on it. The team that built it adds the products, adjusts the pricing and keeps the platform current, so the business isn't waiting on a supplier every time it wants to sell something new.
Chosen so the shop can run itself.
A small business shouldn't need a developer to add a product or change a price. Everything here was picked for what the InkJet World team can maintain without us — a different test from what we'd enjoy building.
- WordPress
- WooCommerce
- Variable products
- Tax-inclusive pricing
- Configurable options
- Quote enquiry route
- Wishlist & comparison
- Quick view
- Saved designs
- Order history
- Order tracking
- Customer accounts
- Irish delivery rules
- Payment methods
- Product management by staff
- Ongoing maintenance
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