WildnRoot is an e-commerce platform for a natural and organic products brand. The client needed a custom-built solution rather than a Shopify theme — their product catalog has unusual attributes, their pricing logic is complex, and they wanted full ownership of the customer data.
The tech stack was Next.js for the storefront, a custom Node.js/Express API, MongoDB for the product and order database, and Stripe for payment processing. This combination gave us the flexibility the client needed without introducing unnecessary complexity.
Product catalog management was the first challenge. Natural products have highly variable attributes — weight, ingredients, certifications, origin, allergens. We modelled this as a flexible schema with a fixed set of core fields and an open attributes map for category-specific metadata. This let editors add new product types without developer involvement.
The cart and checkout flow required the most iteration. We tested five different checkout flows with real users before settling on a three-step design: cart review → shipping and details → payment. Conversion rates at the three-step flow were 23% higher than our initial single-page checkout, largely because the clear progress indicators reduced abandonment at the payment step.
Post-launch, the most requested feature was order tracking. We built a lightweight status pipeline — placed, confirmed, dispatched, delivered — with email notifications at each stage via Nodemailer. This reduced customer support queries by 40% in the first month.