Building a
Neighborhood E-Commerce Platform from the Ground UpFull-Scale
A production e-commerce platform connecting customers with nearby shops, merchants, and local stores, with integrated payments, logistics, AI-powered discovery, and a multi-role management system built to operate at real-world scale.
Product
Planckly
Company
Techwisely, UK
Industry
E-Commerce / Retail Tech
Stack
Next.js, Node.js, Express
Senior Software Engineer — Techwisely, UK
Team Lead & Full-Stack Engineer — contributed across core platform architecture, payment integrations, multi-role systems, admin operations, and modern e-commerce features
01 — The Challenge
Local Shops Were Invisible Online
Neighborhood shops, the stores people visit every week, had no digital presence, no delivery layer, and no way to connect with customers who had moved to online shopping. Planckly was built to bridge that gap: a platform that brings local commerce into the digital economy without requiring shops to navigate complex third-party tools.
The platform also needed to serve four completely different user types simultaneously: customers, merchants, shop owners, and admins, each with their own workflows, permissions, and expectations. The technical challenge was building one coherent system that felt tailored to each of them.
02 — My Role
Senior Engineer & Team Lead
As a Senior Software Engineer at Techwisely UK, I contributed across multiple critical systems of the Planckly platform, from core architecture and payment integrations to modern discovery features and the multi-role management layer.
Core Platform Architecture
Built scalable frontend modules in Next.js and backend services in Node.js/Express, designing a modular architecture to handle complex e-commerce flows at production scale.
Payment & Logistics Integration
Owned the full payment gateway integration and delivery system, handling transaction lifecycles, real-time order tracking, and multi-type delivery support end-to-end.
Multi-Role System Design
Designed the role-based access and permission architecture supporting five distinct user types, each with custom dashboards, scoped data access, and tailored workflows.
Team Lead & Feature Planning
Led the engineering team through structured feature planning, system design decisions, and release pipelines, ensuring the platform stayed stable while we continued shipping new capabilities.
03 — What We Built
Eight Systems. One Production Platform.
Planckly is a live product with real customers and real merchants depending on it daily. Every system below was built for production, not as a prototype, with performance, scalability, and reliability treated as hard requirements.
01
Core Platform — Frontend & Backend Architecture
Built the scalable foundation in Next.js and Node.js/Express using a modular architecture that separates concerns cleanly across product discovery, cart management, order processing, and multi-store operations. Each module can scale independently without destabilizing the rest of the platform.
02
Location-Based E-Commerce & Product System
Built the full product catalog, including listings, categories, advanced filtering, and search, with a neighborhood-first discovery layer. Customers see stores and products relevant to their location rather than a generic national feed. Also built campaign management, offers, and dynamic pricing infrastructure for merchants to run promotions.
03
Payment Integration — Foree Pay & Checkout UX
Integrated Foree Pay and additional digital payment gateways, handling the complete transaction lifecycle: initiation, processing, success, failure, and retry flows. Rebuilt the checkout UX for a seamless in-app experience, reducing cart abandonment and improving payment conversion at the final step.
04
Logistics & Delivery Integration
Built the delivery layer with real-time order status tracking, support for multiple delivery types (store pickup, direct delivery, partner logistics), and third-party logistics provider integration. Orders flow from placement through fulfillment with live updates visible to both customers and merchants throughout.
05
Multi-Role Permission System — 5 User Types
Designed and built a role-based access system covering Admin, Merchant, Shop Owner, Branch Manager, and Employee, each with scoped data access, custom dashboards, and workflows tailored to their function. The data model ensures strict isolation between business entities so no role ever sees data outside their own scope.
06
Centralized Admin Panel & Operations
Built the full operations interface giving the Planckly business team complete control over products, categories, orders, transactions, users, roles, campaigns, and offers, all from one place. Designed so non-technical operators can handle day-to-day platform management without engineering involvement.
07
Authentication, Media & Cloudinary Integration
Implemented OTP-based, token-based, and guest-first authentication flows optimised for conversion. Integrated Cloudinary for all media management, building upload and delete APIs that keep product image handling fast and storage costs predictable across thousands of active listings.
08
AI Recommendations & Short-Form Video Discovery
Worked on AI-powered product recommendations to surface relevant items based on customer behaviour. Also introduced short-form video and reels-style product discovery, a TikTok-inspired browsing experience that brought modern engagement mechanics to local commerce and significantly increased session time on the platform.
04 — Multi-Role System
Five Roles. One Unified Platform.
One of the most architecturally complex requirements was building a platform that felt tailored to five completely different user types, each with their own data scope, workflows, and interface, without building five separate applications.
Admin
Full platform oversight, global user management, and campaign control
Merchant
Multi-store management, product catalog, analytics, and promotions
Shop Owner
Single store control, inventory management, and customer orders
Branch Mgr
Branch-level operations, staff coordination, and order fulfillment
Employee
Task-scoped access for order processing and assigned store duties
05 — Tech Stack
Production-Grade Stack at Every Layer
Every technology decision on Planckly was made with a live platform in mind. Performance, scalability, and maintainability were treated as requirements from the start, not afterthoughts.
Frontend
Next.js
SSR-powered React for fast product pages, SEO-optimised listings, and a smooth app-like shopping experience across all devices.
Frontend LeadBackend
Node.js
Express REST APIs handling all platform flows: auth, orders, products, payments, and multi-role permissions at production load.
Core APIPayments
Foree Pay
Full payment gateway integration covering the complete transaction lifecycle: success, failure, retries, and a rebuilt in-app checkout experience.
Integration LeadMedia
Cloudinary
Cloud image management with custom upload/delete APIs keeping thousands of product images fast and storage costs predictable at scale.
Media LayerDiscovery
AI + Reels
AI-powered recommendations combined with short-form video product discovery, bringing modern engagement mechanics to local neighbourhood commerce.
Modern FeaturesAuth
OTP + JWT
Multi-mode authentication covering OTP, token-based, and guest-first flows, tuned to reduce friction and maximise conversion at onboarding.
Auth System06 — Results
A Market-Competitive Live Platform
8+
Core systems built end-to-end
5
User roles with custom dashboards
Live
Real users, real transactions
Modern
AI & reels-driven discovery
Planckly launched as a market-competitive e-commerce platform, giving local merchants a professional digital storefront and customers a genuinely useful way to shop from nearby stores. The modern discovery features, including AI recommendations and reels-style browsing, set it apart from standard regional e-commerce platforms and drove measurably higher engagement.
“
Building Planckly meant solving every layer of the e-commerce problem at once: discovery, payments, logistics, multi-role operations, and modern engagement features, all on a live platform where any gap was immediately visible to real users. That's the kind of scale and pressure that sharpens engineering judgment fast.
07 — Key Takeaway
What This Project Demonstrates About Full-Scale Delivery
Planckly is the kind of project that tests every dimension of engineering capability. Architecture decisions had to hold under real user load. Payment integrations had no room for missed edge cases. Multi-role systems needed airtight permissions. And consumer features had to drive real engagement, not just look good in a demo.
Delivering across all of these on a single live platform is the experience I bring to every client engagement. If you're building a complex consumer product, a multi-sided marketplace, or a platform that needs to serve different user types at scale, this is exactly the kind of work I do.
Work With Me Directly
Ready to Build
at This Scale?
From e-commerce platforms to complex multi-role systems, I build production-grade products that work under real pressure. Let's talk.