Case Study
AI Custom Sock Designer | WooCommerce Plugin + AI Image Gen
An Australian custom-sock brand had a problem that sounds small and is not. Customers had to describe the socks they wanted in a text box and then wait, with no idea what they would get. Plenty of them did not bother finishing the order.
I built a WordPress and WooCommerce plugin that closes that gap. The customer types the pattern they want, OpenAI image generation returns a few options right on the product page, they pick one, and it attaches to the order.
How it works
Seeing it before paying for it
The preview happens before checkout, which is the whole point of it. Type the design, hit Preview, and a few options come back on the same page. Pick one and add to cart with that design attached.
Giving people more than one option matters here. With a single generated image you either accept it or walk away. With a few, people compare them and pick one.
Getting the cost down
Image generation is not free, and a preview step invites people to try five ideas before buying. Left alone, that turns into a bill with no order behind it.
The fix was generating at low resolution first and upscaling only the design the customer actually selects. I also moved hosting to Cloudinary, which cut the cost further and made previews load fast on mobile, where most of these orders come from.
Handing over the controls
The client runs it, so the plugin has an admin panel behind it: their own OpenAI key, their Cloudinary account, rate limits, and per-product rules for which products get the generator and which do not.
The integration started on DALL-E and moved to GPT-4o when the quality gap became obvious. It is in production.
More screenshots
