Events Marketplace Platform built on WordPress
CulinaryLocal is a marketplace and ticketing platform for culinary events. Hosts, restaurants, and vendors can leverage the platform to sell tickets via the marketplace and through their own branded storefronts.
The backbone of CulinaryLocal is built on WordPress and utilizes WooCommerce to manage orders, payments, and metrics. CulinaryLocal was recently featured in both Events Calendar Showcase and WooCommerce showcase.
Building a Brand
CulinaryLocal was almost purely concept when they approached Spotfin. It lived as just a basic blog and content machine until realizing they wanted to build a platform for event hosts.
Our first approach was to engrain ourselves as deeply as possible into the business to help sculpt the idea of a marketplace.
During research we ran branding process in tandem starting with logo concepts and later adding a color palette to the concepts.
Vetting Core Functionality
A massive part of the CulinaryLocal project was actually planning and learning how the business would operate. CulinaryLocal had a long list of wanted functionality that Spotfin was helping conceptualize, this would later dictate development
During this process we narrowed in on two plugins that would do a lot of heavy lifting for the backend and processes, Events Calendar Pro and WooCommerce.
Thankfully we are well versed in both. Because of this we were able to make quick work of what each plugin would be tasked to do. This helped ensure the overhead of a plugin was worth it vs. custom building similar functionality.
User Feedback & Testing
Once initial development was completed the site was ran as Beta among a trusted group of advisors to CulinaryLocal.
Together we used this feedback and data to drive the next steps for design and development.
