Anthony Lee

The problem

CS-Cart stores products, orders and users in a schema shaped for its own admin, not for other systems to read. Every new integration — sync jobs, webhooks, internal services — meant another team reaching into platform internals and solving the same authentication, validation and payload-shaping problems over again.

What I did

• Put a Fastify service in front of the platform that exposes products, orders and users as structured endpoints, so consumers work against a stable contract instead of CS-Cart’s internal schema.
• Handled authentication, request validation and error handling once at the service boundary rather than in each consumer.
• Normalised CS-Cart’s payloads into predictable shapes, so downstream services stopped re-implementing the same transformations.
• Shipped it with tests, usage examples and README documentation aimed at the teams consuming it.

Outcome

• Other teams integrate against the API on their own, without needing someone who knows the marketplace internals to walk them through it.
• Integration logic that used to be duplicated per consumer now lives in one place, so a platform-side change is handled once.

The problem

A multi-vendor marketplace needs admin and vendor tooling that keeps pace with the platform — product management, vendor onboarding, orders, store configuration. Built screen by screen, that turns into a pile of one-off pages that drift apart in behaviour and are slow to extend.

What I did

• Built the dashboard out of reusable, strongly typed components, so a new screen is assembled from existing patterns instead of hand-rolled.
• Standardised the CRUD and form flows — client-side validation and error states behave the same way everywhere rather than per page.
• Wired role-based access and authentication through admin and vendor workflows, so what each role can reach is enforced consistently.
• Connected it to REST and WebSocket APIs so status changes surface live instead of on refresh.
• Invested in the parts that keep it maintainable: type-safe utilities, linting, build configuration, and onboarding notes for whoever picks it up next.

Outcome

• New admin screens are composed from existing patterns, so the UI stays consistent as the marketplace grows.
• Strong typing catches shape mismatches against the API at build time rather than in production.