Hidden Alchemist

Hidden Alchemist is an e-commerce platform serving a niche technical community in the homebrew and console-modding space. I designed and engineered the entire storefront — front end, checkout, and the payment plumbing — on top of WordPress + WooCommerce with the Avada theme.

This was a deep front-end and integration build, not a drag-and-drop store:

• Multi-step product configurator — a custom vanilla-JS flow that gates the Add-to-Cart and express-checkout buttons until the buyer makes the right selections, preventing invalid orders.
• Dual payment gateways — Stripe and PayPal integrated side by side; I resolved a tricky WCPay / PayPal SDK setProperty conflict that broke the express buttons.
• Free-shipping nudge — a banner with a quantity stepper and an AJAX handler that updates the cart live to push order value over the threshold.
• Design system — a cohesive dark navy / purple theme applied across product, cart, checkout, contact, and empty-cart states.
• CSS architecture — disciplined pruning sessions to cut a bloated stylesheet down to something maintainable.

Hidden Alchemist is where I keep myself honest about how software actually breaks under real users and real payment flows — edge cases in checkout, gateway quirks, and the UX details that decide whether a cart converts or gets abandoned.