Lesson 1: Introduction to the Project

In this course, we are building Shopify-lite. Let’s define what that means.

The Concept

We are building a multi-tenant e-commerce platform. This means a single instance of our software will serve multiple different online stores (tenants), each with their own products, orders, and customers.

Core Capabilities

Our system must support:

1. Storefronts: Fast, SEO-friendly pages for browsing products.
2. Admin Dashboard: Where merchants manage their inventory.
3. Checkout: A secure, reliable way to take money.
4. Inventory Management: Real-time stock tracking to prevent overselling.

The “Why”

Why build this? Because it touches on every hard problem in distributed systems:

• Consistency: Inventory must be accurate.
• Availability: Checkout must never go down.
• Scalability: We need to handle flash sales.
• Security: We are handling credit card data (PCI Compliance).

The Role of Sruja

Most tutorials start by running npx create-next-app. We will not do that yet.

We will start by creating a sruja file. Why? Because we need to agree on the structure before we get lost in the details. Sruja will be our shared whiteboard, our documentation, and our validator.