Arii Shop

A clothing retailer needed a storefront that felt custom and on-brand rather than templated — but with the practical reality that most day-to-day changes (new promos, reordering bestsellers, swapping a hero banner, running a limited-time countdown) would be made by non-developers. Off-the-shelf platforms solve the "admin can edit things" problem but trade away design control, checkout ownership, and charge recurring fees. Hand-building everything as static content solves design control but turns every content change into a developer task and a deploy.

The system splits into two independently deployable halves sharing one MySQL database and communicating over a versioned JSON API: a Next.js storefront for the public-facing, SEO- and performance-sensitive side, and a Laravel + Filament backend for data, payments, and admin. Filament was chosen over a hand-rolled admin because it gave a mature, secure CRUD and RBAC foundation out of the box, so implementation time went into actual e-commerce logic — variant and stock modeling, checkout, CMS structure — instead of rebuilding admin table, form, and auth plumbing.

Nearly every homepage section — hero slider, marquee, limited-time offer, bestsellers, brand statement, split promo, family brands, reviews, latest news, featured collection, FAQ, newsletter — is backed by its own database table and admin resource, with drag-to-reorder curation for merchandising lists instead of hardcoded flags. Payments were integrated directly against Stripe's PaymentIntent API and PayPal's REST API rather than a subscription-oriented package, since these are one-time purchases. A tag-based Next.js cache with a Laravel-triggered revalidation webhook means admin edits go live within seconds instead of waiting on natural cache expiry.