GrillHound — E-commerce Platform
Built from Zero
Client’s Challenge
GrillHound entered the Australian BBQ equipment market as a new online player. The founder had 15 years of physical retail experience but zero digital presence — no website, no search traffic, no customer data. Meanwhile, the category was locked down by three giants: Weber (DR 78, 10M+ AU visitors/yr), Barbeques Galore (DR 72, 320+ stores), and Bunnings (DR 91, household name) — each running multi-million dollar marketing budgets and decades of accumulated domain authority.
The brief we accepted: ship a production-ready e-commerce store in 4 months (not 6, not 8), then earn TOP-3 Google Australia positions for 620+ commercial intent keywords within 12 months — all on a bootstrap budget where every dollar of SEO content and link outreach had to be justified by projected conversion value.
- DA: 0 starting point — fresh domain, no backlinks, no history, competing against sites with 15-year age
- Entrenched incumbents — Weber/Bunnings owned “BBQ australia” and every long-tail brand+size+fuel combination
- 2,000+ SKU catalogue — needed SEO-friendly taxonomy (brand × fuel-type × cooking-area × price) without duplicate content
- AU compliance stack — GST split-display, Australian Consumer Law returns policy, StarShipIt freight calculator by postcode, Afterpay BNPL
- Bootstrap budget — no room for enterprise Magento or Shopify Plus ($2K+/mo); had to run on PHP 8.1 + WooCommerce with custom performance layer
- Speed to market — launch window tied to Australian spring BBQ season (August-November peak); missing it meant 9-month revenue delay
How We Solved It
Market Research & UX Design
6 weeks of discovery: deep competitor audits against Weber, Barbeques Galore, Bunnings — plus 3 rounds of moderated user testing with 18 BBQ enthusiasts before writing a single line of PHP.
Mapped catalogue depth, pricing psychology, filter UX and checkout abandonment patterns for 9 direct competitors. User panel: 12 men 35-55 + 6 women on low-fidelity prototypes. Output: full ATOMIC design system, desktop + mobile, data-informed IA for 12 primary journeys.
WooCommerce Custom Development
Custom WooCommerce 7.x theme with a hand-rolled taxonomy (brand / fuel_type / cooking_area / price_band) and Ajax filters that return in ~180 ms across 2,000+ SKUs.
Lazy-loading infinite grid with IntersectionObserver, skeleton loaders, shareable filter URLs. Nightly CRON diff-syncs stock / prices / images from 11 distributor XLSX exports — zero manual catalogue work for the client.
SEO Architecture & Content Engine
Programmatic SEO across 380 landing pages built on brand × fuel-type × size combinations — each page 800-1,200 words of unique, buyer-intent content pulled from the live catalogue.
Shipped Product, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage and AggregateRating JSON-LD schemas for rich snippets. Zero thin content, zero duplicate risk. Evergreen buying guides drafted by our team, fact-checked against AU consumer law.
AU-specific Integrations & Compliance
Afterpay + Zip BNPL (A/B-tested — 42% of AU BBQ shoppers use BNPL), StarShipIt real-time freight by postcode across 4 couriers, Xero sync, full ACL-compliant returns flow.
Freight quoting against Australia Post, Startrack, Couriers Please, Aramex. GST inclusive/exclusive toggle for B2B. Age-gated checkout for charcoal/gas products under state regulations. The founder never exports a CSV again.
Performance & Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals green on 96% of tracked pages. Redis full-page caching with TTL-keyed invalidation on stock/price changes, Cloudflare CDN across 14 AU+SEA edge nodes.
AVIF/WebP image pipeline with 5-breakpoint srcset, 9 KB critical CSS inlined, deferred JS with preconnect hints. Search Console confirmed ranking boost correlated directly with Web Vitals improvements month-over-month.
Link Building & Digital PR
6-month outreach earning 84 referring domains from AU home, garden and lifestyle publications — Broadsheet, Urban List, RealEstate.com.au, Domain, Lifestyle.com.au + 12 niche BBQ blogs.
Ghost-drafted HARO pitches for the founder 3× a week, guest posts on complementary verticals (outdoor living, real estate, food). DR climbed from 0 to 34 in 12 months — a rate Ahrefs ranks in the top 4% of new AU domains.
Our Implementation
ajax-filters.php
// WebCoreLab — GrillHound Ajax Product Filter
// Filters 2,000+ SKU in ~180ms, zero page reloads
add_action('wp_ajax_wcl_filter', 'wcl_filter_products');
add_action('wp_ajax_nopriv_wcl_filter', 'wcl_filter_products');
function wcl_filter_products() {
check_ajax_referer('wcl_filter_nonce', 'nonce');
$args = [
'post_type' => 'product',
'posts_per_page' => 24,
'paged' => intval($_POST['page'] ?? 1),
];
$tax_query = ['relation' => 'AND'];
$filters = [
'brand' => 'pa_brand',
'fuel_type' => 'pa_fuel-type',
'size' => 'pa_cooking-area',
];
foreach ($filters as $key => $taxonomy) {
if (!empty($_POST[$key])) {
$tax_query[] = [
'taxonomy' => $taxonomy,
'terms' => array_map('sanitize_text_field', (array)$_POST[$key]),
];
}
}
if (count($tax_query) > 1) $args['tax_query'] = $tax_query;
$query = new WP_Query($args);
wp_send_json_success([
'found' => $query->found_posts,
'max_pages' => $query->max_num_pages,
]);
}
// → +34% filter usage, -61% bounce on catalog pages
Measurable Impact
Measured 12 months from launch
“I had a warehouse full of BBQ gear and zero online sales. WebCoreLab built everything from scratch — the store, the SEO, the integrations. Twelve months later we hit $2.1M in revenue. They didn’t just build a website; they built a business channel.”
— J.P., Founder, E-commerce Retail (NDA)