What is Ecommerce?
An ecommerce platform is an online system that allows businesses to sell products and services directly to consumers over the internet. It provides tools for managing inventory, processing payments, and ensuring a seamless shopping experience. Best examples include amazon, flipkart, snapdeal, ebay and more.
Why to develop an ecommerce platform?
Creating a custom ecommerce platform as a web development project offers invaluable learning opportunities. You’ll gain hands-on experience with front-end development (design, responsive layouts), back-end development (server-side logic, databases, APIs), and full-stack integration. Additionally, you’ll learn about user authentication, inventory management, and security best practices, which are critical skills for real-world web applications. It’s a comprehensive project that enhances both technical and problem-solving abilities.
Tech Stack?
Since, we are focusing on website development here, using JavaScript and its frameworks and libraries would be best for us:
Frontend: ReactJS, TailwindCSS
Backend: ExpressJS & NodeJS
Database: MongoDB
Keep this simple: all the UI and pages would be developed using ReactJS and for the ease of designing we use TailwindCSS. The backend would be developed using NodeJS where ExpressJS would handle the REST API requests and with mongoose we would create and manipulate the data.
What kind of data do we have?
Using MongoDB we would handle the following data:
User profile: Name, address, gender, profile photo, previous orders, upcoming orders
Shopping Cart of the User: would contain reference to all the data of products user wish to buy.
Products: The product name, product images, product category, product description, color and size (if any), stock quantity, reviews by other users, and seller details
Order details: Reference to the product, date of order, buyer address, seller address, delivery status and payment status (cash on delivery or online)
What components and pages should be developed?
A nice and clean Navigation bar with our company logo and links to various other pages of the website, a search bar, button for shopping cart and a login/logout button.
The home-page with a carousal of images of latest product launch and sales and offers, hereafter we would be having latest trending products, category wise.
Up next we would have a login and register page:
A page for product description and review and ratings:
A page for filling the address, selecting the payment option and placing the order:
A page for user’s shopping cart:
A page dedicated for your previous order
The user profile page:
Looks awesome isn’t it?
So, these are all the UI components of the website, and now we would talk a bit about our backend, which comprises or schemas for our database models and routes for various API calls.
So as mentioned above about the data we are going to store in our database we have 4 model:
User Model
Cart Model
Order Model
and finally the Product Model
There would me multiple APIs which connect to the ExpressJS server and apply CRUD operations on the data.
Conclusion
This ecommerce website, built using React for the front end, Node.js for the back end, and MongoDB for the database, provides a seamless and dynamic user experience. It demonstrates the power of modern web development technologies, combining responsive design and efficient data management to create a robust and user-friendly online shopping platform.