Project Overview
Eat Bitty is a homemade, local food business that needed a simple way to take orders online — without the overhead of a full e-commerce checkout. Customers were used to ordering through WhatsApp and Instagram DMs, which worked but made it easy for orders to get lost or miscounted during busy days.
The goal was to keep the ordering experience just as simple for the customer, but centralize it into one page: browse the menu, pick what you want, and send the order — no accounts, no payment gateway, no unnecessary complexity for a home-based food business.
Technical Challenges
Since there's no payment integration, the whole ordering flow had to be handled purely through form submission and email — no database tracking orders, no order accounts. An Express.js server handles serving the site itself, while a native PHP endpoint using PHPMailer processes each order submission and emails the full order details — items, quantities, and customer contact info — straight to the owner's inbox, ready to confirm and fulfill manually.
The other challenge was making sure the order form was foolproof for customers on mobile, with clear validation and confirmation, since there's no backend record if an email fails to send — the form needed to give honest, immediate feedback rather than a false "order placed" message.
Key Features
A simple, photo-led menu of Eat Bitty's homemade dishes, a straightforward order form (items, quantity, notes, and contact details), and instant email delivery of every order to the business owner via PHPMailer — no payment collected online, with payment handled directly between the customer and the business the same way it always was, just without the DM back-and-forth.