The problem
A small fashion brand needed real e-commerce — not a Shopify skin. Multi-currency for AU / US / UK / EU / NG buyers, a clean admin, and a way to answer product questions in chat without hiring a customer-success team.
What I built
Solo-architected production storefront with 20+ SKUs and an embedded "Amanda" AI shopping assistant. Live FX across AUD, USD, GBP, EUR, NGN updates on cart-currency switch. Hybrid cart persists across sessions and devices via cookie + DB sync. Images flow through Cloudinary → AVIF / WebP CDN with eager transforms.
Admin panel uses Prisma + role-based access; staff can edit products, see orders, and respond to chat handoffs without a separate dashboard.
The Claude tool-use integration is the interesting part: the AI doesn't just answer questions, it looks up real stock, real pricing for the user's currency, and real shipping ETAs by calling typed tools on the backend.
What it shipped
- ~$1k AUD / month revenue baseline within first quarter
- Mean image weight cut from ~340KB (JPG) to ~85KB (AVIF) for above-the-fold
- Cart-abandonment recovery via Stripe webhook + email sequence
- Stable single-engineer ops — no third-party headless commerce middleware