Problem
Most starter e-commerce demos stop at a static product grid. YKB Clothing was engineered as a complete full-stack shopping platform with persistent user sessions, realistic catalog filtering, dynamic cart calculations, checkout processing, user reviews, and an administrative panel for catalog management.
My role
I built the project end to end: storefront interface, client-side state handling, Node.js and Express backend API, MySQL database schema, JWT authentication, and administrative tooling.
Key features
Stack
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Node.js, Express.js, MySQL, JWT, bcrypt, Multer, Cloudinary, CORS, and Nodemailer. Deployed on Render.
Architecture & Technical Breakdown
A hard problem
Keeping cart state in sync between the client and the server without a frontend framework. I kept UI rendering separate from API calls, and used REST endpoints for products, cart, wishlist, and orders on a normalized MySQL schema for catalog and order data.
What I would do differently
I would continue improving the project for production use by adding deeper automated testing, expanding third-party payment gateway integrations, improving order management analytics, and strengthening automated monitoring and deployment workflows.