Categorized catalog & search
A 10-category catalog with sub-categories, filtering, sorting, and instant search – plus dedicated, SEO-indexed product pages.
E-CommercePet RetailFull-Stack PlatformLive
Alpha PetCare
One trusted place to buy pet food, medicine, and toys – with checkout, tracking, and delivery built in.
- Role
- Design & full-stack engineering
- Industry
- Pet retail
- Timeline
- 12 weeks
- Delivery
- 1 day early
- Platform
- Web – Storefront · Admin · API
- Status
- Live in production
Overview
The story in brief
Alpha PetCare is an online store for everyday pet care – food, medicine, and toys – built for a Sri Lankan pet shop that wanted to sell beyond walk-in traffic. We designed and engineered the whole platform end to end: a fast customer storefront, a management dashboard for the shop owner, and the API and infrastructure that tie them together.
The result is a single system a non-technical owner runs day to day, and a store customers can browse, order from, and track – without ever creating an account.
02
The challenge
Pet owners had to juggle multiple shops and phone orders to get food, medicine, and toys, with no dependable way to order and receive them. The shop, meanwhile, had no digital storefront and no tooling to manage inventory, orders, or promotions.
It needed to work for two very different users at once: customers who expect a frictionless, trustworthy checkout on any device, and a single business owner who needs to run the entire operation – catalog, pricing, stock, orders, and refunds – without touching a database or a line of code.
03
The approach
We built a decoupled platform: a SEO-optimized Next.js storefront, a React admin panel, and a NestJS API backed by PostgreSQL and Redis. The admin panel is the single source of truth – pricing and stock changes reflect on the store immediately.
Checkout is guest-only by design, so there are no accounts or passwords to manage; orders are tracked by order number instead. We layered in the details that make an online shop feel dependable: real-time stock reservation to prevent overselling, a guarded order lifecycle, automatic refunds on cancelled card orders, and transactional email at every step.
Beyond the agreed "Essential" scope, we added a customer refund-request flow, public order tracking with PDF receipts, self-service cancellation, and a refund-aware income analytics dashboard – features that make the store genuinely operable rather than just live.
04
What we built
The capabilities that turn a live URL into a store the owner can actually run.
01/08
storefront
Categorized catalog & search
Cart with stock reservation
Guest carts reserve stock the moment an item is added – a Redis-backed session releases it on expiry, so the store never oversells.
COD & card checkout
Cash on Delivery plus online card payments through Genie Business hosted checkout – card data never touches the system.
Guarded order lifecycle
A rules-enforced status flow from pending to delivered, with automatic stock restoration on any cancellation or rejection.
Order tracking & PDF receipts
Customers track orders by number on a live status timeline and download a signed, rate-limited PDF receipt – no account needed.
Refund requests
A guided toy-refund flow with photo evidence and identity checks, feeding an admin review queue with one-click gateway refunds.
Admin management panel
Full CRUD for products, offers, orders, refunds, tips, and testimonials – the shop owner runs everything without developer help.
Refund-aware analytics
An income dashboard with net-revenue trends, order and payment breakdowns, and top products – refunds netted out automatically.
Categorized catalog & search
A 10-category catalog with sub-categories, filtering, sorting, and instant search – plus dedicated, SEO-indexed product pages.
Cart with stock reservation
Guest carts reserve stock the moment an item is added – a Redis-backed session releases it on expiry, so the store never oversells.
COD & card checkout
Cash on Delivery plus online card payments through Genie Business hosted checkout – card data never touches the system.
Guarded order lifecycle
A rules-enforced status flow from pending to delivered, with automatic stock restoration on any cancellation or rejection.
Order tracking & PDF receipts
Customers track orders by number on a live status timeline and download a signed, rate-limited PDF receipt – no account needed.
Refund requests
A guided toy-refund flow with photo evidence and identity checks, feeding an admin review queue with one-click gateway refunds.
Admin management panel
Full CRUD for products, offers, orders, refunds, tips, and testimonials – the shop owner runs everything without developer help.
Refund-aware analytics
An income dashboard with net-revenue trends, order and payment breakdowns, and top products – refunds netted out automatically.
01 / 08
05
Under the hood
Hover a stack group to trace its path in the system
- Storefront
- Next.js 16React 19Tailwind CSS 4
- Admin panel
- React 19Vite 6Tailwind CSS 4
- Core API
- NestJS 11PrismaPostgreSQL 16Redis 7
- Payments & email
- Genie Business (Dialog)Mailjet
- Infrastructure
- DockerNginxGitHub Actions CI/CDLet's Encrypt TLS
Architecture
- conversion_pathThree decoupled apps – storefront, admin panel, and core API – deploy and scale independently while sharing one contract.
- conversion_pathContainerized delivery with an automated CI/CD pipeline: every push builds an image and rolls out over SSH behind an Nginx reverse proxy.
- conversion_pathCart state and stock integrity live server-side in Redis and PostgreSQL, so orders stay consistent even under concurrent checkout.
06
The outcome
Shipped ahead of schedule · live in production
12 wks
Delivery timeline
1 day
Ahead of schedule
3-in-1
Storefront · Admin · API
100%
In-house engineered
Shipped in 12 weeks – one day ahead of schedule – and live in production on the client's own infrastructure.
Delivered well beyond the original "Essential" package: customer refund requests, order tracking, PDF receipts, self-service cancellation, cart stock reservation, and a full analytics dashboard all arrived at no added scope.
The shop now sells online end to end – customers browse essentials, pay by cash or card, and track delivery to their door – extending the business far past walk-in traffic.
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