How La Vo Patisserie runs click and collect across its UK boutiques on Shopify

The shop

La Vo Patisserie makes French pastry in Britain. Chef Salah Mallaali has been working in patisserie since 1982 and has trained pastry chefs around the world. The shops carry that history: macarons, brownies, single slices, signature cakes, and bespoke celebration cakes built to a brief. La Vo counts more than 120,000 cakes served, all finished by hand.

The boutiques sit inside shopping centres in Bromley, Watford and Basingstoke, each with its own kitchen, its own opening hours and its own busy Saturday. All three take click and collect orders online. For a bakery selling on Shopify, the collection date is part of the product.

That is the part Shopify checkout has no opinion about. It will take the order without ever asking which shop the cake is going to, or whether that shop can have it ready.

The problem

La Vo's catalogue holds three different promises at the same time:

• Same Day Collection cakes, ready the day the order comes in.
• Signature cakes on 48 hours' notice. Pistachio, Ferrero crunch, matcha mango and passion fruit, Raffaello coconut, black forest, rainbow.
• Bespoke celebration cakes on 72 hours, designed for the customer.

A shopper cannot tell those apart by looking. They are all cakes on the same site at similar prices, and a checkout that treats them identically will happily sell a bespoke cake for tomorrow morning.

Now multiply that by boutiques in three different towns. Which shop is this for. Which day. Is that kitchen already full that weekend. Without something enforcing it at the cart, every one of those questions gets answered by a person, after the money has already changed hands. Someone reads the order, works out whether the date is possible, and picks up the phone.

For a business where a cake is usually attached to a birthday or a wedding, that phone call is the worst part of the week.

Then local delivery arrives on top of it. A cake going out to a customer's address is a different promise again: it needs its own notice period, and it only makes sense inside a radius the kitchen can actually reach. Salah describes the model he wants in one line. Same day for collection, a day's notice for delivery. Getting a Shopify store to hold both of those at once, per product, per shop, is the hard part.

The fix

La Vo runs Bird Pickup & Delivery on Shopify. The whole setup does one thing: it settles the shop and the date before the customer pays.

• Click and collect across the boutiques, so a customer picks where they are collecting from rather than leaving it to be sorted out later.
• Multi-location support, so each shop keeps its own schedule, hours and capacity inside a single Shopify store.
• Per-product lead times, so a Same Day Collection cake and a 72-hour bespoke cake offer completely different calendars from the same catalogue.
• A date and time picker in the cart, so the collection day and slot are locked in before checkout instead of guessed after it.
• Time slots shaped around each boutique's real opening hours, not one national calendar.
• Availability on the product page, so a shopper sees the earliest date for that specific cake while they are still deciding whether to buy it.
• Blocked dates and cut-off times for the days a kitchen is already committed.
• Local delivery priced by postcode area, so an address is checked and costed before the order goes through, with a minimum order on the areas furthest out.
• Email notifications that confirm the boutique, the date and the slot in writing.

The piece doing the heavy lifting is per-product lead times. One rule set cannot serve this catalogue. A same-day slice and a bespoke tiered cake need to disagree with each other about what "tomorrow" means, and they need to do it in the same cart, for the same customer, without anyone in the kitchen intervening.

La Vo drives it from product tags. A cake carrying the 48-hour tag offers dates two days out, a cake carrying the 72-hour tag offers three, and anything untagged stays available for same-day collection. The rule lives on the product, so adding a new cake to the catalogue means tagging it correctly rather than rebuilding a schedule.

Shopify's own pickup and delivery handles the straightforward version of this well. What it does not do is give one product a same-day calendar and another a 72-hour calendar, then check both against the opening hours of whichever shop the customer chose. That gap is what Bird closes for La Vo.

What changed

The phone is quieter.

That is the honest headline. The questions that used to arrive one at a time, by call and by email, are now answered by the cart before anyone has to ask. Which shop, which day, how soon, is it ready. A customer picks the boutique and the slot, pays, and gets a confirmation with all of it written down. The kitchen reads the same calendar the customer saw.

The catalogue also stopped fighting itself. Same-day, 48-hour and 72-hour cakes each show the dates they can actually meet, so the fastest thing La Vo sells and the slowest thing La Vo sells can live on the same shelf without one making a promise the other has to keep.

The clearest measure is what La Vo has done with it since. They started on Bird in 2024 with collection at a single shop. Two years on, the same account runs the collection schedule for boutiques in three towns, a tagged catalogue where three lead times coexist, and postcode-priced local delivery from the boutiques that offer it, each area with its own rate. Nothing about that was a single switch-on. It was added a piece at a time, as the shops opened and the delivery map grew, which is the part that matters for a bakery weighing this up: the scheduling has to stretch as the business does, without the catalogue being rebuilt each time.