BookShop
Full-stack e-commerce build
Role
Sole developer
The problem
I wanted to build every part of a transactional application myself - auth, catalogue, cart, balance, reviews - rather than assemble one from packages.
The approach
Laravel and MySQL, with a points currency instead of real payments so the whole purchase flow could be built and tested without a payment provider.
Tale of the tape
500
point welcome bonus
Full
auth, cart, reviews, ratings
2025
first full-stack build
Decisions
Points instead of payments
Using an internal points balance let me build and test the entire purchase path - balance checks, failure states, order history - without onboarding to a payment provider for a learning project.
Kept online, with a caveat
It runs on a free host that sleeps when idle, so the first request takes several seconds to wake. I have left it live and labelled rather than quietly dropping it - it is the project that taught me the stack.
Stack
On a phone
Also on the card