🛍️ E-commerce Platform | Full-Stack Shopping Application

Welcome to this full-stack e-commerce web application, a comprehensive project built from the ground up to demonstrate a complete MERN stack implementation. This platform provides a modern, intuitive, and secure online shopping experience for users, alongside a powerful and easy-to-use dashboard for administrators.

The goal of this project was to engineer a robust, real-world application that handles everything from user authentication and product discovery to state management and order processing, showcasing a deep understanding of both frontend and backend development principles.

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Built With

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🚀 Key Features

For Customers:

• Product Discovery: A clean and responsive interface to browse, search, and filter products across various categories.
• Shopping Cart: Fully persistent cart functionality allowing users to add, remove, and manage items.
• User Account Management: Secure user registration, login, and a personal profile page to view order history.
• Secure Authentication: User sessions are managed securely using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for protected routes and actions.
• Order Processing: A streamlined, multi-step process for securely placing orders.

For Administrators:

• Dedicated Admin Dashboard: A separate, secure interface for site management.
• Content Management: Full CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) capabilities for products.
• Real-time Inventory Control: Easily manage product stock, pricing, and details, with changes reflected instantly on the site.

🛠️ Tech Stack

This project was built using the MERN stack and other modern web technologies.

Frontend:

• React.js
• Redux Toolkit (for global state management)
• Tailwind CSS

Backend:

• Node.js
• Express.js (for building RESTful APIs)

Database:

• MongoDB

API & Authentication:

• RESTful APIs
• JWT (JSON Web Tokens)

⚙️ Getting Started

To get a local copy up and running, follow these simple steps.

Prerequisites

• Node.js installed on your machine
• npm or yarn
• MongoDB instance (local or cloud)

Installation

1. Clone the repository

   git clone <YOUR_REPOSITORY_URL>

2. Navigate to the backend directory and install dependencies

   cd server
   npm install

3. Create a .env file in the server directory and add the following environment variables:

   PORT=8080
   MONGO_URI=<YOUR_MONGODB_CONNECTION_STRING>
   JWT_SECRET=<YOUR_JWT_SECRET>
   

4. Navigate to the frontend directory and install dependencies

   cd ../client
   npm install

5. Start the backend server

   # From the 'server' directory
   npm start

6. Start the frontend development server

   # From the 'client' directory
   npm start

The application should now be running on your local machine.

🔌 API Design

The backend serves a RESTful API for all data transactions. [cite: 14] Key responsibilities include:

• User Authentication: Endpoints for user registration, login, and profile updates, protected with JWT middleware.
• Product Catalog Management: API routes for fetching, creating, updating, and deleting products.
• Order Processing: Secure endpoints to handle the creation and retrieval of user orders.