E-Commerce Platform

Headless commerce with Stripe & real-time inventory

Role

Full Stack

Duration

3 months

Team

2 engineers

Deliverable

Production Platform

Visit Live Site↗View Repository↗

The Challenge

The Problem

A merchant needed a fast storefront with Stripe checkout, but Shopify's transaction fees were eroding margins on high-volume SKUs.

The Outcome

Impact & Results

Custom headless build increased conversion by 22% (faster LCP) and eliminated 2.9% transaction fees, saving ~$18k/year.

Overview

System & Product Architecture

A headless commerce build replacing a fee-heavy Shopify store: a statically-rendered Next.js storefront backed by a custom catalog and order API, with Stripe handling payments directly. Inventory updates propagate to the storefront in real time so flash-sale SKUs never oversell, and the entire funnel was tuned for Core Web Vitals.

Capabilities

Key Engineered Features

Statically rendered product pages with ISR for instant loads

Direct Stripe checkout — no platform transaction fees

Real-time inventory sync to prevent overselling

Admin panel for catalog, orders, discounts, and refunds

Abandoned-cart recovery emails

Engineering

Edge Cases & Hard Technical Problems

Complex scenarios solved through careful concurrency control, schema modeling, and fault-tolerant system design.

Race conditions on the last unit of a flash-sale SKU — inventory is reserved atomically at checkout start and released if payment isn't completed in 10 minutes

Stripe webhook retries arriving out of order (refund before charge confirmation); handlers are idempotent and state transitions are validated

Currency rounding on multi-item discounts so the sum of line items always equals the charged total

Guest checkout carts merging cleanly when the user logs in mid-purchase

Stack