May Bakes

May Bakes sell mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn festival. Not year round: the shop opens for September and closes again. That makes it a pop-up with a hard end date rather than a store that happens to be seasonal, and everything about the build follows from it.

It runs on Square Online, because the bakery already takes payments on Square and one month of trading does not justify moving platforms. Two products — a box of six thousand-layer mooncakes in four flavours, and a mooncake cheesecake — sold for collection on September weekends, or delivered on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday within thirty kilometres, priced in four distance bands.

The season is the hard part. Square has a preorder mode that looks made for exactly this, and it is a trap: it forces the order cutoff to fall before the first collection date, so a shop whose first pick-up is the 12th must stop taking orders on the 11th. A month-long season would have closed after a week — which is what happened, until the client tried to order and could not. The season is expressed through the location's fulfilment rules instead: collection days, delivery days, notice periods and blocked dates. Same boundaries, without shutting the shop.

Notice is a day, cut off at ten in the morning, so a Friday morning order can be collected on Saturday and a Friday afternoon one on Sunday. That is the rule a kitchen actually works to. Built with TGFX, who hold the client relationship. The site is meant to be taken down when the festival ends, which is an unusual thing to build toward and a clarifying one — nothing here is waiting on a second phase.