Tropiplants

The product

Tropiplants sells tropical fruit plants at wholesale prices to anyone — home growers, landscapers and small nurseries all pay the same. There are no accounts to apply for, no resale certificate, and no pricing tiers. Buy six of a variety and you pay what a nursery pays. Every plant is established, well-rooted, and guaranteed true to name.

It is a full storefront, not a catalog: browsing and search, product pages with growing information, a cart, Stripe checkout, order confirmation, customer reviews, and an admin back office for managing products, pricing and fulfilment.

The interesting problem: selling stock you do not own yet

Most e-commerce assumes a warehouse. Tropiplants does not have one — and does not need one. A customer order is what triggers the purchase. An order for six plants prompts a tray of seventy-two from the grower; six ship out and the remaining sixty-six sit on the shelf for the next eleven orders, which ship with no new purchase at all.

That inverts a rule most store software hard-codes. Here, a product showing zero stock is still perfectly sellable — it just means the next order starts a tray. The catalog, the cart and the checkout all had to be built around backorder-as-normal rather than backorder-as-exception, which is exactly the kind of business logic an off-the-shelf platform fights you on.

Built to keep the money right

• Integer cents everywhere. No floats, no decimal columns — prices, shipping and totals are exact by construction.
• Carts store only IDs and quantities. Prices, names and stock are re-read from the database at render and at checkout, so a cart left open for a week can never lock in an old price or a discontinued plant.
• Minimums enforced server-side. The six-per-variety minimum is applied when adding, when updating, and again at checkout — a hand-crafted request asking for a single plant still lands at six.
• Transparent pricing rules. Retail is a flat markup over supplier cost, so margin is identical on every plant; shipping is a dollar per plant with a six-dollar floor. Both live in one place in the code.
• No secrets in the repository. Database credentials, Stripe keys and shipping config live in a server-side environment file that is never deployed and is blocked at the web layer.

Built & operated end-to-end

We designed the brand, built the storefront and the admin, wrote the supplier price-list import tooling, wired up payments, and we run it day to day — including the deploys. It is deliberately boring infrastructure: plain PHP and MySQL on shared hosting, no framework, no build step, and nothing to break when a dependency changes upstream.

Why it matters

Tropiplants is a small business whose rules do not fit a template — order-triggered buying, per-variety minimums, live supplier pricing, tax-free edible plants in Florida. Building it from scratch cost less than bending a hosted platform into that shape, and it does exactly what the business does. That is the case for custom software in one page.