Procastangling — A Bespoke PrestaShop 9 Commerce Platform

Procastangling sells across two countries with one team and one catalogue. They needed a single system to run procastangling.com in pounds and procastangling.ie in euro, without duplicating products or bolting together a dozen third-party plugins that never quite fit an angling business.

The requirements ran deep: search that actually understands tackle and copes with typos; stock that always matches what's physically on the shelves; pricing, offers and shipping that behave fairly across a range spanning tiny hooks to 12-foot rods; and retention tools — loyalty, gift vouchers and rewards — that most off-the-shelf stores simply don't have. All of it had to stay in sync automatically, day and night.

We build and maintain the whole platform on PrestaShop 9 as a true multistore, migrated from their previous PrestaShop 8 build, with a bespoke child theme and eighteen custom modules written specifically for how Procastangling trades.

Rather than depend on third-party services for the things that matter most — search, stock, currency routing — we built our own, so each behaves exactly as the business needs and nothing is held hostage to an external subscription. A single in-house cron system keeps every moving part current, and everything ships through version control with a tested dev-then-live workflow.

The store runs on PrestaShop 9.1.3 with one shared catalogue and two shops (UK/GBP, Ireland/EUR). All modules follow a consistent house architecture — PSR-4 SimonTodd\* namespaces, service classes behind thin hook bodies, and a shared Symfony/Twig admin design language — so the whole suite feels like one product, not a pile of separate add-ons.

Pricing, shipping and stock are computed server-side, so what a customer sees is always what they are charged. Deployment is Git-based over SSH with a DDEV environment mirroring production, and the platform deliberately avoids third-party dependencies for search, geolocation/currency and stock — each is handled by a module we own and can extend.

This is a platform, not a shop template. Below is a tour of the main systems we built and keep running.

Search we built from scratch

Rather than pay for a hosted search service, we wrote Prosearch — an in-house, typo-tolerant instant search. It uses trigram fuzzy matching with Levenshtein re-ranking, a synonym dictionary, query understanding (it recognises price and attribute intents), merchandiser 'pins' for promoting chosen products, popularity fed by real customer behaviour, and zero-result logging so staff can see what shoppers wanted but didn't find.

The same catalogue work powers fast faceted browsing. We consolidated years of duplicate product options — carefully preserving option headings like Feather Colour and Lure Colour — and rebuilt the filters, so a big category narrows cleanly by discipline, size, colour and availability.

Landing pages built for how anglers shop

Each fishing discipline gets its own designed landing page — not a bare category list. A hero, a 'shop by type' grid, a 'new in' rail and best-seller shortcuts let anglers dive straight into the gear for their style of fishing, whether that's carp, fly, sea, match or predator.

A cron system that keeps everything current

Everything above stays fresh automatically thanks to Procron, a minute-driven scheduler we built. One real server cron entry pings it every minute, and Procron runs whichever registered jobs are due — each on its own cadence — with an admin screen, run history and secure tokens. It currently orchestrates thirteen jobs: Sortly stock (a 10-minute delta and a nightly full reconcile), both search indexes and the faceted filters, the automated Sale category, loyalty processing, gift-voucher expiry, hourly abandoned-cart recovery, per-store XML sitemaps, and the Google/Microsoft shopping feeds. Add a feature, register a job — it just runs.

Live stock, straight from Sortly

Procastangling manages physical inventory in Sortly, so we made Sortly the single source of truth and built Sortly Sync to mirror it into PrestaShop — strictly read-only, so the shop can never write bad data back. A 10-minute delta catches recent changes and a nightly reconcile guarantees the full catalogue matches, applied with efficient set-based SQL. It has a circuit breaker, low-stock email alerts, a dry-run mode and an exception-driven dashboard, and it even refreshes the search module's in-stock flags as levels change.

Pricing, offers and merchandising

A family of modules handles how products are priced and promoted. strrp stores a recommended retail price at product and variant level and shows the strike-through 'was' price and exact saving wherever a product appears, currency-aware for Ireland. shipfees applies carrier-aware shipping — free delivery unlocked by order value, premium couriers never made free, and fair surcharges on oversized items like rods and bedchairs, with plain-English small print. An automated Sale category rebuilds daily from genuine savings only, and Price Match lets customers submit a 'found it cheaper' request that runs through an approval workflow and issues a single-use cart rule.

Keeping customers coming back

We built the retention toolkit in-house. Loyalty is a points programme on an immutable ledger with tiers, expiry and reminders — customers earn on every order, refer friends for bonus points, and redeem against future baskets from their account.

Gift Vouchers are multi-currency and multi-store, with a live-preview builder that emails a branded, secure-coded PDF. And abandoned-cart recovery sends a configurable three-stage email sequence with an optional discount and one-click cart restore.

Fulfilment and operations

Click & Collect gives per-store stock, admin-editable slot patterns, timed reservations with cron expiry, HMAC-signed QR collection tickets and a staff till view. Order-for-Delivery lets customers buy out-of-stock items with a delivery lead time and tracks each through sourcing → received → shipped. Order Export gives the dispatch team a filtered, copy-paste-and-CSV/XLSX address tool for labels — read-only, so it can never disturb an order.

Found everywhere, indexed properly

On the marketing side we built a Canonical & Hreflang module that fixes the duplicate-content cases PrestaShop misses (multi-category products, tracking-parameter bleed, pagination, cross-language hreflang), a staff SEO Audit scanner that checks products, categories, pages and journal posts against SERP guidelines, per-store XML sitemaps, and Google/Microsoft shopping feeds generated per storefront and refreshed nightly. There's also an in-house Journal (blog) with clean URLs.

Localisation and payments

Location & Currency detects a visitor's country, routes them to the right storefront and locks the correct currency — replacing three separate third-party plugins. Checkout supports Revolut, Stripe, Klarna and PayPal alongside cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Designed mobile-first

Most anglers browse on their phone, so the storefront is built for mobile from the ground up. An always-visible bottom navigation bar keeps Home, Browse, Search, Account and Basket one thumb-tap away on every page, and a full-screen Browse menu organises the whole catalogue by discipline — with live category counts — so nothing is more than a tap or two away.

One control panel for the theme

Finally, Procast Theme Settings replaces scattered config values and hand-edited SCSS with a single Design panel — colour/type/spacing tokens, header and megamenu options, the free-shipping bar, sticky add-to-cart, homepage hero, USP strip, per-page block visibility and scheduled blocks — so the team can tune the storefront without touching code.