Marasil is a family-run home-goods retailer with a loyal in-store customer base and no online presence. They hired me to build their first e-commerce platform end to end — storefront, checkout, and the admin tools to run it without a developer on staff. I owned the project from discovery through launch over 10 weeks.

Customers kept asking to order through Instagram DMs, and the owners were losing sales to competitors with proper online stores. Manual order-taking over chat was error-prone, payment was cash-on-delivery only, and inventory lived in a spreadsheet nobody trusted. They needed a real store — but off-the-shelf platforms couldn't handle their bilingual catalog and local delivery-zone pricing.

I built a custom storefront on Next.js with a PostgreSQL catalog supporting Arabic/English product content, Stripe checkout with local payment methods, and delivery pricing calculated by zone. The admin dashboard lets staff add products, track stock, and process orders from one screen — no technical knowledge required. Server-side rendering keeps product pages fast and indexable by Google.

We started with a week of discovery in their actual shop, watching how staff handled Instagram orders. The biggest challenge surfaced mid-project: their delivery pricing had unwritten exceptions ("that neighborhood is close, we charge less"). Rather than hard-coding rules, I built a zone editor the owners manage themselves. Weekly preview deployments meant the staff was already trained on the dashboard before launch day.