06 / E-commerce · 3D storefront
Pan African Market
An Australian store for African groceries, beauty and fabrics — with a 3D market hall you can actually shop in.
- Role
- Sole engineer
- Status
- Live
- Period
- 2026
- Type
- E-commerce · 3D storefront
- market hall with full checkout
- 3D
- stall per category, real stock
- 1
A / Architecture
API + storefront with an event-fed back office
A NestJS API owns catalogue, orders and fulfilment as a state machine; the Next.js storefront and 3D hall read from it, and the admin gets every order change pushed live.
00 Clients
- Storefront · Next.js
- 3D market hall · three.js
- Admin dashboard
01 Edge
- Auto-HTTPS proxy
- Media CDN
02 Services
- API · NestJS
- Order state machine
- Shipping · carrier API
- POS sync
03 Events
- Socket.IO order feed
- Signed webhooks
- Payment events
- Customer notifications
04 Data
- PostgreSQL · TypeORM
- Off-site backups
Engineering notes
- 01
A market hall in the browser
One stall per category stocked with real product photos — backgrounds removed client-side with a flood fill — a cashier at the till, and checkout without leaving 3D.
- 02
The shop’s till stays in charge
Epos Now category and product sync with signed webhooks, so the physical shop and the website agree.
- 03
Click & collect that talks back
Live pickup states — ready, on the way, arrived, collected — WhatsApp notifications and a realtime admin order feed.
- 04
Orders that never double
TGE shipping rates, dispatch and tracking sync; an order state machine with history; idempotent payment handling so a retried payment can never create a second order.
- 05
Small-ops infrastructure
Containerised services with automatic HTTPS, push-to-deploy from CI and nightly off-site database backups — run end to end by one engineer.
B / Infrastructure & delivery
How it ships, scales and stays up.
- Hosting
- Containerised services on isolated internal and database networks behind an automatic-HTTPS proxy.
- CI/CD
- GitHub Actions builds images and deploys automatically on every merge.
- Backups
- Nightly database backups kept off-site.
- Payments
- Stripe with idempotent handling, so retries never double-charge or double-order.
- Integrations
- Epos Now POS with signed webhooks, TGE shipping and tracking, WhatsApp notifications.
- Media
- sharp image pipeline, client-side background removal for 3D stalls, R2 storage.