Project Overview
Vers van Zee (“Fresh from the Sea”) is an online seafood store in IJmuiden, the Netherlands, selling fresh, frozen, and smoked seafood, from everyday fish to king crab and caviar, delivered chilled to the customer's door.
I built the store on WordPress and WooCommerce. Selling perishable goods online is mostly an operations problem: the site had to encode the business's delivery rules, keep orders and emails reliable, and still feel like a modern store.
The Challenge
Fresh fish doesn't tolerate standard e-commerce logic. Orders placed before 3 p.m. Monday through Thursday go out for next-day evening delivery; Friday and weekend orders wait until Tuesday. Shipping costs a flat rate and becomes free above a threshold, packaging is insulated, and pickup in IJmuiden is an option. The store had to make all of that obvious so customers order with confidence.
The site itself started from scratch: a brand-new domain registered in early 2025, and nearly a hundred products across a dozen categories that needed consistent presentation, branded imagery, and Dutch-language content built up fresh for this store.
My Role
My scope was the store itself: catalog, checkout, and the operational rules around them.
- Building the store on WordPress and WooCommerce with Elementor Pro and an e-commerce theme
- Structuring the product catalog and its category architecture
- Integrating Mollie for Dutch payment methods
- Custom order plumbing: site-specific endpoints and automated product-image branding
- Email reliability, marketing opt-ins, SEO, and caching setup
The Solution
The store runs WooCommerce on the Ecomus e-commerce theme, built out with Elementor Pro: a Dutch-language storefront with category landing pages, wishlist, stock display, and guest checkout, so buying a box of fish takes as few steps as possible.
The delivery model lives in the site, not in a FAQ nobody reads: a dedicated shipping policy page spells out order cutoffs, delivery windows, the free-shipping threshold, insulated packaging, and the IJmuiden pickup option, and the homepage leads with the order-today, delivered-tomorrow promise.
Some of the build is custom code: a site-specific plugin exposes its own REST endpoints for order-completion emails and diagnostics, and product photos run through an automated pipeline that produces branded, web-optimized images.
Around the store sit the systems that keep it trustworthy and found: Mollie for payments, FluentSMTP for reliable transactional email, MailPoet and Mailchimp for opt-ins, a Google-reviews widget for social proof, a recipe blog built on WP Recipe Maker, Rank Math for search, and LiteSpeed Cache behind Cloudflare for speed and bot protection.
Technical Highlights
WooCommerce built around perishables
Order cutoffs, delivery windows, free-shipping threshold, and pickup, spelled out prominently across the store instead of buried in fine print.
Custom store plumbing
Site-specific REST endpoints for order-completion emails and diagnostics, plus an automated branded-image pipeline.
Reliable e-commerce email
FluentSMTP for transactional delivery, with MailPoet and Mailchimp handling marketing opt-ins.
Cached and protected
LiteSpeed Cache behind Cloudflare's CDN and bot protection keeps the store fast and defended.
Results & Outcome
Verified Results
- Today the store lists 93 published products across 12 categories with EUR pricing, Mollie payments, wishlist, and guest checkout, and is actively maintained (checked August 2026).
- Google indexes the store's product pages under keyword-formatted titles, and 14 recipe posts were published between August 2025 and March 2026.
Project Outcomes
- The business got a complete working online store: catalog, payments, delivery rules, and email flows.
- Operational rules live in the site, so customers see accurate delivery expectations before they pay.
- Recipes and reviews give the store content and trust signals beyond the product grid.