← Notes

Lititz PA: merchant ads by subscription tier

Merchant portals and subscription-tier ad rotation for a local directory — WooCommerce roles driving what shoppers see.

Lititz PA needed merchants to manage presence in a local directory while shoppers saw ads that matched each merchant’s subscription level — not a flat listing that treated every business the same.

Subscription-aware ads

A custom WordPress redirect/auth flow borrowed WooCommerce role logic so merchants landed in the right portal. Ad rotation used a shuffle keyed to subscription roles — higher tiers got better placement rules without hand-curating every impression. Taxonomy filters let visitors browse merchants by category without losing the subscription-driven ad layer.

Product lesson

The hard part wasn’t “make a directory.” It was encoding business rules (who pays for what visibility) into WordPress roles and front-end queries so marketing could sell tiers without an engineer editing templates per merchant.

Stack: WordPress, WooCommerce, PHP, ACF, Gravity Forms, JS. Live: lititzpa.com