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Global VIP Services · Passport & visa expediting · Los Angeles

A passport office where nobody types a shipping label anymore.

Global VIP Services has expedited passports and visas in Los Angeles since 2003. Every order used to pass through a person three times: to take the card, to type the FedEx label, and to handle the paperwork. I built the checkout that does all three.

Client
Global VIP Services and Premier Passports
Sector
Passport and visa expediting
Built
Website, payments, shipping labels, online applications
Status
Live on both brands

The problem

Every order ran through a person.

Customers read their card numbers out over the phone. Someone at the counter took them down, then created a prepaid FedEx label so the customer could send their documents in, copying every address by hand.

Visa applications were government PDFs, printed, filled in by hand and brought to the counter or mailed. With two brands and two offices, Los Angeles and Arlington, an application could also land in the wrong office's inbox.

None of it was hard. All of it was slow, and every step waited on someone being free to do it.

What I built

Pay once, and the label sends itself.

The owner's brief was one sentence: the customer generates nothing and the office reviews nothing. So the checkout does the office's part, in an order that protects both sides.

  1. The customer applies online

    China, Brazil, India and Nigeria visa applications are online forms on both sites. Each one carries the office it belongs to, so Los Angeles applications reach Los Angeles and Arlington's reach Arlington.

  2. They pay on the site

    The price is set on the server, never in the browser, so it cannot be edited. The card is charged before anything else happens.

  3. The FedEx label is created

    Only once the payment goes through. If FedEx fails for any reason, the charge is voided on the spot, so nobody pays for a label that does not exist.

  4. The label reaches their inbox

    The customer gets the prepaid label by email and can download it from the confirmation screen. The office gets a copy with the label attached and a link to the application.

  5. The order is logged

    A row lands in that brand's order sheet with the tracking number and the application link. No new system to learn, just the spreadsheet the office already reads.

Online application
Card payment
Office choice
Checkout
FedEx label
Emails to both sides
Order sheet
One checkout takes the payment first, then makes the label, sends the emails and logs the order. A failed label voids the charge.

What changed

The office stopped doing the typing.

Payments, labels and applications now move without a staff member in the loop. Before launch, both brands ran a real $1 order end to end, and both test labels were voided.

It started as a website. Payments came next, then the labels, then the forms. None of it was scoped on day one, which is how most of this work goes.

Under the hood

How it’s put together

See the live site
  • Card processing on the site itself, in the brand's existing merchant account
  • FedEx shipping API, prepaid inbound labels to the right office
  • Order log in Google Sheets, one sheet per brand
  • Emails to the customer and the office on every order
  • Safety order: charge, then label, then log. A failed label voids the charge
  • Two brands, two offices: Global VIP Services and Premier Passports

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