Cashew Store

Inspiration

My family runs MK Cashews, a cashew business, and I've seen firsthand how much of the ordering, inventory, and customer communication is still done manually — over phone calls and WhatsApp messages. I wanted to build a real e-commerce platform that could bring our family business online, while also giving me hands-on experience building a production-style full-stack application.

What it does

Cashew Store is a full-stack e-commerce web application where customers can:

Browse cashew products with images, descriptions, and pricing Add items to a cart and place orders View product categories and details (Admin side) Manage product listings and orders It's designed to give a small food business like MK Cashews a simple, professional online storefront.

How we built it

Frontend: Built with React for a fast, component-based UI Backend: Node.js and Express handle the API layer, routing, and business logic Database: MongoDB Atlas stores product, user, and order data in the cloud The frontend and backend communicate via REST APIs, with the backend deployed separately from the client Challenges we ran into Structuring the project correctly — early on, files were accidentally created inside node_modules/, which took some debugging to fix Connecting the React frontend to the Express backend and MongoDB Atlas cleanly, especially around environment variables and CORS Designing a schema that could represent real cashew products (variants, weights, pricing) in a simple way Accomplishments that we're proud of Took the project from idea to a working full-stack app end to end Solved real project-structure and deployment issues independently Built something that could genuinely help a real small business (MK Cashews) go online

What we learned

How to structure a MERN-style project (MongoDB, Express, React, Node) cleanly Debugging real-world issues like file structure conflicts and environment configuration The full lifecycle of building and connecting a frontend to a live cloud database What's next for Cashew Store Add secure payment integration Add an admin dashboard for order and inventory management Improve product search and filtering Deploy a polished, public version for MK Cashews to actually use

Built With

• css3
• express.js
• mongodb
• mongodb-atlas
• node.js
• react