E-commerce pharmacy storefront

A pharmacy needs a simple online path from browsing medicines by category to a checked-out cart — without a heavyweight commerce stack. Built as the engineering core of an internship project, the app covers the catalogue → cart → authenticated-order flow with just the pieces it needs.

Full-stack developer on the internship team — built the React storefront and the Node.js/Express backend, then deployed the application to production on Vercel.

Illustrative architecture of the deployed system.

React Context for the cart

The cart is shared state with a handful of actions (add, remove, quantity). Context plus a reducer covers it without pulling in a global state library — fewer dependencies, same predictable updates.

Category-driven catalogue

Products hang off categories, which shapes both the navigation and the API: one query path for browse-by-category, another for search — matching how customers actually shop for medicine.

Pincode serviceability as a first-class check

Delivery feasibility is verified before checkout with a pincode lookup, so unsupported addresses fail early instead of after an order is placed.

JWT auth + Vercel deployment

Simple token auth keeps the API stateless, and Vercel gives the frontend production hosting with zero infra overhead.

Cart state across pages

Cart contents had to survive navigation between category, product, and checkout views — solved with a single Context provider mounted above the router so state never resets mid-session.

Catalogue consistency

Price and stock fields are validated on the server for every cart mutation, so the client can't submit stale quantities or prices from an outdated page state.

Deployment across two parts

Frontend and API were wired into one production deployment on Vercel with environment-driven API URLs, keeping preview and production configurations separate.

• Order history and repeat-order flow
• Admin inventory management
• Payment integration
• Automated tests for cart and checkout