Building a production-grade e-commerce platform from a brand concept
Turning a brand deck into a working e-commerce storefront with real auth, real payments, and a full admin dashboard — Go backend, React frontend, deployed on Hetzner.
Challenge
Lue Cosmetics began as a brand concept designed for a client who did not engage. Rather than let the work sit, we built it out as a working e-commerce case study — a real website visitors could browse, add to cart, check out, and explore as either a fresh customer or a pre-seeded demo account.
Strategy
Build a genuinely production-grade system, not a demo. Real database, real auth (argon2id, DB sessions, Google OAuth), real payments in test mode (Paystack with GHS + Mobile Money), real email (Resend), and an admin dashboard showing live orders and revenue from the database.
Architecture
Go backend (chi) with a three-layer service pattern, sqlc for typed queries against Postgres, and OpenAPI as the single source of truth between backend and frontend. The React frontend uses TanStack Router and TanStack Query, with an Orval-generated type-safe API client from the OpenAPI spec.
Process
We shipped in iterative plans: backend foundation, catalog + shipping, auth + RBAC, cart + guest merge, checkout + Paystack + email — each plan producing working, tested endpoints before the frontend caught up.
Decisions
Hand-rolled auth instead of a third-party service to keep the stack lean and demonstrate real security engineering. Frontend API client generated from the backend OpenAPI spec (Orval) to eliminate schema drift. All money math server-side — client prices are never trusted.
Results
A working e-commerce platform deployed at lue.senvon.studio: browse 25 products, register or log in via email/password or Google OAuth, add to cart, check out with Paystack test mode, track orders in your account dashboard — and admin users can manage orders from a live dashboard.