High-performance e-commerce platform

When this client was smaller, their catalog lived in Airtable. That was enough until the company started to grow. Database cost rose quickly, and day-to-day management got painful, so they asked for a custom e-commerce platform built from scratch - a system they could run and extend without paying an exploding third-party data bill.

I built the customer-facing store for this US B2B seller of specialised medical instruments, plus a backstore for inventory and sales analytics. Checkout uses PayPal because the company is US-based. The live catalog is 50+ products. Order size ranges from a few lines to bulk purchases in the hundreds, depending on the customer. Staff who add or edit products sign in with issued credentials; that backstore is protected with multi-factor authentication.

The hardest part was the product schema itself. Each item has attributes, and variants are mapped from combinations of those attributes. Images are often mapped to color so the correct photo appears when a shopper selects a swatch. That model sits in PostgreSQL, with nested attributes and image assets in Supabase, behind a Next.js storefront tuned for page-load performance.