"Checkout Works. Then What?"

Add-to-cart finally closed the loop this week, and a working Stripe checkout round trip immediately opened a much bigger question than the one it answered.

Week of August 10, 2026

Progress

• Add-to-cart on the store page finished: the cart badge updates and the user gets a prompt to go to the cart or keep shopping — settles the question left open two weeks back
• Found an edge case while testing deletes: removing the last item from a cart produces an invalid, empty cart snapshot, and the error wasn't surfacing in the alert the way it should
• Started the cart-delete implementation — trigger logic in place, service logic still to come
• deleteCart() added to LaBoutiqueService, and laBoutique's API extended to support both item-level and whole-cart deletes (whole cart when no item id is passed)
• Got a basic Stripe checkout round trip working
• Spent a morning thinking about where srchParty goes next — lending and general inventory capabilities beyond lost and found, and how that fits the larger "building deep and meaningful communities" mission alongside Daanago and Yajigo

The Hard Part

Checkout works now — Stripe redirects back, the round trip completes — and then absolutely nothing happens. No provisioning, no order status update, nothing. That's the real problem for next: how laBoutique handles provisioning and order status tracking. The plan taking shape is that laBoutique owns most of it, but digital goods get handled directly by srchParty, which then reports status back to laBoutique. Either way, something needs an interface to drive provisioning — at first just me, clicking through an admin screen, but designed so it doesn't have to stay that way. If fulfillment ever moves to something like a sticker printer service, it should be able to receive provisioning requests and report status back through the same API rather than needing a special case.

Getting the Stripe side working had its own small snag: the cancel and success URLs being sent to Stripe were laBoutique's own URLs, which is a strange place to land if you started the checkout from srchParty. Had Claude add support for passing those URLs explicitly in the checkout POST instead, which worked cleanly. Needed a few Stripe CLI updates to get local testing working again too.

Also spent time with Claude working through what observability should look like for both srchParty and laBoutique, beyond the current error-log-only setup. Two constraints shaped the direction: self-hosted, and minimal external dependencies — partly for the obvious reasons, partly because there's real joy in learning this stuff by building it.

Decision Made

Keep laBoutique's item-level DELETE endpoint instead of replacing it with a cart-only delete. The built-in LaBoutique interface still depends on deleting individual items, so both stay in place for now — cart delete for the "everything" case, item delete for the rest.

Pass checkout success/cancel URLs explicitly through the checkout POST rather than hardcoding laBoutique's own URLs. Fixes the disorienting case of launching checkout from srchParty and landing back on laBoutique afterward.

Observability for srchParty and laBoutique will be self-hosted with minimal external dependencies. Same reasoning either way — control over the data, and the learning value of building it out myself.

Learnings

An empty cart — every item removed — isn't a valid cart snapshot as far as laBoutique's update endpoint is concerned. Not a case I'd designed for until testing forced it.

The Question That Appeared

What does provisioning actually look like for a digital good versus a physical one, and how much of that can be automated versus needing a human — me, for now — in the loop?

Next Week

Finish deleteCart()'s service-side logic, then start designing what happens after a successful checkout — provisioning and order status tracking.