Purell wanted to test a B2C model for the UK market. No existing site, this was from scratch. The project came through Oscat Media, who I’d been working with as friends at that point. They handled PM and client communication. I did the build. WooCommerce was the obvious choice. Scalable, no vendor lock-in, and Purell needed room to grow if the B2C experiment worked.
How the catalogue worked
The standard product grid was there – the lazy version of selling hygiene supplies, where the customer does all the matching work. Purell sells dispensers in different types, each taking specific refills, and there are a lot of combinations. A pure catalogue grid wasn’t going to do the job.
So I built industry-specific landing pages on top of it. Restaurants, health and fitness, facilities dealing with tough soils. Each one with messaging and product recommendations that matched the actual use case. Someone running a restaurant doesn’t want to browse a generic product grid. They want to know what goes in their kitchen and what goes by the front door.
For repeat customers, I added search by refill number and filtering by dispenser brand and type. You shouldn’t have to remember which product page you bought from six months ago. Punch in the number on the refill you’re replacing, find the right one, order it.
There was also a subscription option built into the dispenser product pages. Buy a dispenser, lock in refills at a discount. Recurring revenue baked into the purchase – the kind of thing that makes a B2C experiment actually sustainable.
The configurator
The most interesting feature was the configurator. The client wanted a system where someone could input how many entryways, bathrooms, and kitchens they had, and get a tailored recommendation: these dispensers, these refills, this many of each. Sent straight to the cart.
That’s the kind of feature that sounds like a simple form when someone describes it in a meeting. It turns into a real architecture problem once you’re building it. Every room type maps to different dispenser types. Each dispenser takes specific refills. Quantities have to calculate correctly. And all of it has to translate cleanly into WooCommerce cart items with the right variations.
Two years in
The site launched in 2022 and ran for two years. I handled updates, security, performance, and ongoing development the whole way. The architecture held up – no rebuilds, no rescues, no surprises.
Purell eventually closed their UK operations – a business decision on their end, not a technical one – and the site came down with the closure of the local entity. By that point the configurator and subscription model had both done their jobs, and the technical side of the B2C concept was clearly sound.
