This one's a live store for an actual business, not a portfolio checkbox.

Nandiniz'Aura sells handcrafted candles and home decor, and needed an online store. On paper that's product pages, a cart, checkout, orders and an admin page. Add payments, inventory, customer accounts, transactional emails and fulfilment, and it stops being a frontend exercise. Real money and real orders go through it, so I wanted to build it right.

The store

Customers get a storefront, a product catalogue, a cart, checkout, account pages, order history, and the brand pages a business needs.

I care more about the admin side. I built a dashboard for managing products, categories, users, orders, stock, featured products and analytics, which is everything needed to run the store day to day. The dashboard is the reason the business can run on this.

The stack

The stack is Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Prisma, NextAuth, Razorpay and Resend. Standard tools. The hard part was getting them to work together.

Payments go through Razorpay. The server verifies Razorpay's webhook to decide whether a payment went through, and never trusts the browser. Auth is role-based, with admin-only routes and protected APIs. Placing an order creates the records, sends the emails, and shows up in the admin dashboard ready to act on.

I also handled CSRF protection, route protection in middleware, product image uploads, category management, order status updates and customer account flows.

Commerce is the wrong place to guess, so I wrote a test suite that covers the API routes, middleware, auth, payment verification, order emails, products, users, categories and analytics.

Every layer of a store has a consequence for someone. If the cart is weird, the customer loses trust. If payments are flaky, the business loses money. If the admin dashboard is confusing, someone makes up for it by hand. If there are no tests, every change is a tiny gamble.

A small business now runs on it, and I had to care about both the customer experience and the backend underneath. That's the kind of work I love.