The Brief
The official Ukrainian representative of a Korean skincare brand needed a store where a shopper could find a product by what was inside it, not by guessing a product name. The positioning was clean beauty and hypoallergenic formulas, so ingredients and skin type had to drive the catalog instead of sitting in a footnote — and repeat purchases had to be rewarded automatically, without anyone issuing coupons by hand.
What Was Built
1. Catalog architecture, not a filter widget
The catalog was built on five separate attribute taxonomies — active ingredients, product group, product line, skin type and product type — where every term gets its own indexable URL instead of a dead-end filter state, and every taxonomy gets its own sitemap. Today that structure holds 48 ingredient pages, 24 categories across two levels and 10 skin-type pages, so "niacinamide" and "for oily skin" are real landing pages a search engine can rank rather than query strings it ignores. That's the whole point of the build: attributes treated as first-class pages, not as a widget in the sidebar.
2. Loyalty that runs itself
Cumulative discount tiers were calculated from a customer's lifetime order value, applied automatically at checkout and shown in the cart, alongside a separate first-order discount after registration and a free-shipping threshold. Merchandising labels — new, bestseller, vegan, sale — and scheduled campaigns were moved into the admin panel, so the team could launch a promotion without a developer and without touching prices by hand.
3. Stock and the Google side of the catalog
Product pages showed the exact number of units left and flipped to sold-out on their own, and SKUs carried the same codes the client's accounting system used, so the storefront and the back office referred to a product the same way — no manual matching when an order was processed. Every product page also carried full Product/Offer/availability structured data, so Google reads price and stock from the catalog itself instead of from a second spreadsheet that quietly drifts out of date.
The Result
The team ran the catalog, pricing, promotions and stock themselves — day-to-day operation never depended on a developer being available.
- Ingredient and skin-type pages gave search engines something specific to rank instead of one generic shop page.
- The same structured catalog fed paid campaigns.
- Live since 2020; the client's team has run it since, so what's online today also includes their later changes.
Stack, honestly: WordPress and WooCommerce on a custom theme (geektheme), with Elementor Pro for content pages, custom attribute taxonomies, cumulative loyalty rules, stock control, WayForPay checkout and Yoast SEO Premium. The interesting part isn't the platform but the catalog model — attributes as indexable entities with their own sitemaps — which is the same structure I build on a modern stack today. Knowing exactly how it's wired inside WooCommerce is also what makes moving a store like this off WooCommerce safe later on.