Selling cakes from your own website and online shop
Online storefront
Your shop is two things that ship together: a website you build from sections, and a checkout that prices carts against the same product data your dashboard uses. The website builder and gallery are on every plan. The transactional storefront, the part that takes money, starts on Growth. Removing the "Powered by ibakepro" credit is on Business.
Why it exists
A generic website builder knows nothing about your products. It does not know that the 8 inch (20 cm) version costs more, that the peanut warning has to follow the filling or that Saturday is already full. So the site becomes a brochure, and the actual ordering goes back into direct messages, where you retype every price by hand and find out later that you quoted the old one.
Building the site
You start from one of seven templates: Artisan, Minimal, Soft, Natural, Velvet, Retro and Counter. A template is not a separate website with its own rules. Each one is a different look over the same shop, which is why they all behave identically at checkout.
The sections are the usual furniture with a couple of bakery-specific ones: hero, gallery, collections, featured products, about, FAQ, testimonials, contact, newsletter, marquee and a drop lobby for limited releases.
If you do not want to sell online yet, there is a contact-only mode. The shop routes stay off, the site is an enquiry form and that form can be embedded into another website you already run, and you decide which websites are allowed to embed it.
What happens when someone checks out
The important detail is the order of operations. The storefront is pay first. A cart becomes a checkout session, and the session becomes an order only once the payment succeeds. There is no half-order sitting in your dashboard from someone who abandoned at the card screen, and no order number burned on a sale that never happened.
Prices are never trusted from the page. Every cart is repriced against your live product data, then the fulfilment method, discount code, tax and any tip or upsell are applied, and that figure is what gets charged.
The customer chooses how they get it at checkout, from the methods you have enabled: collect, delivery or post. Delivery pricing and time slots come from your own delivery configuration, not from a separate storefront copy of it.
Money moves through your own payment gateway. Stripe connects today, with PayPal and Square coming soon, and the funds go to your account without passing through ours.
Your web address
Every account has a subdomain on ibakepro from the day it opens, and you can choose what that subdomain is. On Growth and Business you can also connect a domain you already own: you add it, ibakepro shows you the DNS records to create and it verifies once they resolve.
A connected domain carries a purpose: storefront, customer portal, both or the wholesale area. That is how one business can serve a public shop on one address and a trade area on another. One domain per account is the rule, and you find that out at the point of connection, not later.
Design decisions
- Publishing is a deliberate action. The draft stays yours until you press it, section edits included.
- An ingredient shortfall is recorded on the order as a stock warning for you to see. If you need a hard ceiling, set a maximum order quantity on the product, or run the release as a drop, which is the path that genuinely cannot oversell.
- Connecting a domain you own is self-serve on Growth and Business. Searching for and registering a new one inside ibakepro is rolling out to the beta list, and shows as coming soon otherwise.
- Customers check out without creating an account, then follow a private link to their order portal.