Case study / GEX
A store, and the two things a store cannot do.
GEX buy, fix and upgrade games consoles. Selling parts is a shop. Taking in a broken console, or buying one back off a customer, is not — and that half of the business had nowhere to live.
What we built
The shop is the easy half.
A storefront for parts people search by fault
Consoles, games, controller parts, console parts, DIY repair kits and spares, on WooCommerce — organised the way someone with a broken console actually shops, by what they need to replace rather than by brand.
Two journeys WooCommerce does not have
Book a repair and sell a console are not orders. They have no cart, no fixed price and no checkout — they start with a description of a fault or a device, and end days later at a figure. Neither fits an ecommerce order, so both got a system of their own.
Every request becomes a record with a code
A repair or trade-in request is created as a tracked job with a unique code, a status and a history. Staff work it from an admin screen built for the job; the customer sees it in their My Account area, or on a public page by entering the code alone.
Built so an update cannot delete it
The tracker is a self-contained plugin, not theme code or a page builder layout. WordPress, WooCommerce and theme updates cannot overwrite it, and it can be moved, disabled or handed over as one piece.
The plugin
An enquiry stops being an email.
A repair or trade-in request used to be the same thing every contact form produces: a message in an inbox, with no state, no owner and no way for the customer to check on it. So the answer was never a better form. It was giving the request a life of its own — a code, a stage, and a page the customer can look at without phoning to ask.
Repair
- 01Request Received
- 02Diagnosing
- 03Awaiting Your Approval
- 04In Repair
- 05Ready / Dispatched
- 06Completed
Sell to GEX
- 01Request Received
- 02Item Received
- 03Under Evaluation
- 04Offer Made
- 05Offer Accepted
- 06Payment Sent
Staff move a job along from an admin screen built for it. The customer sees the same stages in their account, or on a public page by entering their code alone — no login, which matters when half of a repair shop's customers never made an account in the first place.
Results
Repair volumes and turnaround times are GEX's numbers, not ours to publish.
What we can say is what the system changed structurally: every request now has a state, an owner and a customer-facing status, where before it had none of the three. We will put figures here if and when GEX are happy for them to be public.
The work
- Ecommerce build
- WordPress & WooCommerce
- WordPress plugin development
- MW Analytics
Does half your business live in an inbox?
Quotes, repairs, bookings, returns — if the answer to "where is mine?" is someone checking their email, tell us what the process looks like and we will tell you what it would take to give it a status.
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