What it is
Cofifi — Afro Coffee & Treats Co. — roasts 100% Ethiopian beans the traditional way, by women, and sells a CBD line alongside the coffee. Three products to start: the coffee, a coffee with CBD, and a CBD oil. The brand’s story is the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, and the site is built to carry it rather than bury it under an “our story” page.
Selling coffee and CBD from one shop is harder than it sounds. CBD narrows which payment providers will take you, limits what you are allowed to say, and can make the coffee next to it look like something it is not.
Decisions worth naming
- Two doors from the homepage. The Roastery and the Apothecary. A coffee buyer never has to wade through CBD to reach their bag of beans, and a CBD buyer lands somewhere that takes the product seriously.
- One accent, one meaning. Coffee is black and bone; teal belongs to the CBD line and nothing else. The colour tells you which side of the shop you are on before the copy does.
- CBD copy describes; it never claims. Dose, format and spectrum, a compliance line on every page that carries CBD, and a batch number with a link to its certificate of analysis on each CBD product.
- No payment gateway hard-coded. Most gateways restrict CBD, and the South African ones approve CBD merchants case by case. The gateway is a WooCommerce setting, so approval changes a setting rather than the code.
- Grain, not gloss. Flat black reads cheap on a screen. A faint film grain and soft light behind each packshot give the dark pages the texture of the packaging.
How it is built
A custom WordPress theme on WooCommerce, written by hand: no page builder, no build step, and only the two WooCommerce templates that actually needed changing are overridden. WooCommerce keeps doing what it is good at — cart, checkout, stock, shipping and tax — and the theme does the rest.
One command takes an empty folder to a working shop: it installs WordPress and WooCommerce, activates the theme and sets up the pages, menus, categories and products. It is safe to run twice, so a failed install is fixed by running it again.
