Client Work · Live · Launch site
ZimBasket
A pre-launch site for ZimBasket, the Johannesburg grocer for Zimbabweans in South Africa: a new brand and illustration set, the brands customers know from home, how delivery works, WhatsApp ordering, and a waitlist backed by a small PHP and MySQL endpoint on AWS Lightsail.
Stack
AWS Lightsail · PHP · MySQL · HTML and CSS
The problem
ZimBasket already had a few hundred customers ordering on WhatsApp, but no web presence: nothing to search for, nothing to share, and no way to collect people waiting for the online shop.
The goal
Launch a brand and a fast landing page ahead of the full store, so customers can order on WhatsApp today and join the waitlist for the online shop, without promising anything the business has not confirmed.
Engineering decision
Built the waitlist as one hardened endpoint rather than a plugin: same-origin POST only, a size cap, a honeypot, a hashed per-IP limit plus a global hourly cap, and a database user that can only touch the waitlist tables.
Tradeoff
Shipping the brand and waitlist first, with the WooCommerce store following, gets ZimBasket found and collecting demand now, at the cost of a second launch later.
Insights
Leading with "Order now on WhatsApp" kept the page useful on day one, because that is how the existing customers already buy.
Every claim on the page was checked against what the client had confirmed, so delivery areas, times and endorsements stay off until they are true.
