Academic Publishing E-Commerce Platform

The storefront had to serve two distinct groups simultaneously: Romanian customers paying with local cards and bank transfers (where Netopia is the local standard), and international academics paying with Visa, Mastercard, and Amex (where Stripe is the default). Running both was non-negotiable.

Fulfillment was another friction point. Staff were printing FanCourier shipping labels one at a time, manually transcribing addresses — an error-prone process that consumed hours of daily time. Any new system that didn't automate that workflow wouldn't be meaningfully better than the old one.

We chose Laravel 11 + Livewire 3 over an Inertia+Vue stack. The editorial team needed to make small content changes themselves (product descriptions, pricing, new titles) without running a frontend build or deploying — Livewire's server-driven rendering kept the maintenance surface small and the deploy process simple.

Two payment guards coexist cleanly: Stripe handles EUR and USD for international; Netopia handles RON for Romanian cards, with local bank transfer as a fallback. Checkout auto-selects the processor based on the customer's detected country, with manual override available.

FanCourier's API integration auto-generates and prints shipping labels at order confirmation. Staff still review exceptions, but routine orders move from purchase to printed label in under a minute. Spatie Translatable manages the Romanian / English bilingual storefront without the overhead of a full i18n system.