Pre-Book · Phase 1
Pre-Book Documentation & Requirements
Phase 1 deliverable. A complete, standalone reference to the pre-book tool as it exists today, plus the prioritized requirements that size the design and development phases that follow.
Purpose
Lemonade Creative built St. Croix's pre-book tool as a proof of concept. It has since become one of the primary ways St. Croix does wholesale business. It runs on Shopify without touching Shopify's native ordering, and it has been extended season by season to keep pace — but the assets a mature product would have, a site map, page-level documentation, and a UI design file, have never existed. Everything that makes the tool work lives in the code and in the Agency's team.
That missing foundation is the gating issue for the broader B2B platform work. The tool cannot be improved, reskinned, or integrated by any party until it is documented and design-complete. This set is that foundation: an accurate reference to the tool as it exists today, plus the prioritized requirements that size the phases that follow.
Four documents
User Flows
Every path through the tool, the three modes one storefront switches between, and the eight gates that decide whether a user may proceed.
Open → 02Information Architecture
Five screens and six overlays, documented page by page: what each is for, who sees what, and which states it can be in.
Open → 03End-to-End Flow
The five places pre-book data lives, the save and submit payload paths, and what the backend does with each.
Open → 04Requirements
Fifty-two prioritized requirements across ten areas, and an honest read on what they mean for the Phase 2 and Phase 3 estimates.
Open →Basis & method
This set documents behavior, not intent. Where the tool does something whose reason is undocumented outside the code, it is recorded as fact. Where behavior is genuinely unestablished, it is marked open rather than inferred — nine such items in Document 01, eight backend confirmations in Document 03. Each is assigned an owner and carried into the requirements set, so that nothing quietly becomes an assumption.
Requirements are written as capabilities rather than solutions. The point of Phase 1 is to define what has to be true, and leave Phase 2 free to decide how.
Headline findings
| # | Finding | Detail in |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | One storefront behaves as three products. Regular ordering, rep regular-order, and pre-book share a cart whose primary button means three different things. The mode lives in browser session state. | Doc 01 |
| 02 | The program has no screen. The object the tool exists to manage is a list item on a dashboard already carrying five other jobs. | Doc 02 |
| 03 | Five of eight gates are invisible. Ship dates narrow silently, order caps announce themselves by being hit, and a closed program looks identical to no access. | Doc 01 |
| 04 | Submit is a one-way door with nothing in front of it. No review, no confirmation of irreversibility, no post-submit surface, and a generic Shopify receipt as the dealer's only artifact. | Doc 03 |
| 05 | Customer metafields are the system of record. A season's wholesale program sits in a Shopify field designed to annotate a customer, with no transactions and last-write-wins semantics. | Doc 03 |
| 06 | There is no administrative product. Programs, windows, thresholds, caps, and every word a dealer reads are configured in theme settings by whoever knows which field means what. | Doc 02 |
Pre-book enforces a sophisticated set of commercial rules and explains almost none of them. Phase 2's largest opportunity is not visual — it is making the program legible: where a dealer stands, what a decision costs, and what they are committing to before they commit.
Open items
Seventeen items across the set could not be established from the storefront alone. Nine block Phase 3 sizing and are collected in Document 04, Section 15. Five of those nine are questions rather than investigations, and could close in a single working session with St. Croix IT and ops.
What happens next
| Step | Action | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Review this set and mark anything that misrepresents current behavior | St. Croix |
| 2 | One working session to close the nine sizing blockers | Joint |
| 3 | Agree the Phase 2 requirement cut — core, deferrable, and whether admin is in or out | Joint |
| 4 | Phase 2 statement of work, priced firm against the agreed cut | Lemonade |
Per the Phase 1 agreement, acceptance runs on ten business days from receipt. Anything that does not conform to the Statement of Work will be corrected at no charge; notes are best sent as a marked-up list against the requirement and finding IDs, which are stable across the set.