AstaCollections

Asta Collections is a direct-to-consumer jewellery store for the Pakistani market. It sells a single brand's catalogue of rings, pendants, earrings, bracelets and sets, priced in rupees, with the two payment methods local shoppers expect: cash on delivery with a configurable advance, and bank transfer against an uploaded receipt.

Shoppers browse and check out as guests or as registered customers, while the business runs the entire catalogue, orders, pricing, content and checkout design from an admin panel without touching code. It is a single-store deployment with two authenticated realms: an admin realm gated at the edge and re-checked inside every admin API handler, and a customer realm that ties a shopper to their own orders and wishlist.

Designed, built and deployed by one engineer in an active window of 68 days.

The shopper's cart is treated as an untrusted local cache to be reconciled against the server. Placing an order runs a single database transaction that recomputes every line from the product record (base price plus any selected variant modifiers), validates required options, checks both product stock and per-variant stock, applies coupon rules including per-customer usage caps, and then commits the order, decrements stock, writes an inventory ledger entry, records an order event and books any coupon redemption together. The order either lands consistently or not at all.

The same pricing computation is exposed through a validation endpoint the cart calls whenever it is shown, which is what lets the browser keep a fast local copy while never being the authority on price. The alternative, trusting the client's totals, is precisely the failure the cart's cached prices later demonstrated.

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