A Shopee-style marketplace serving the Vietnamese shopper, originally branded Nantian 南天: a storefront with flash sales and vouchers, a seller portal for shops, and an admin console covering 856 products, orders, permissions and banners. Express + MongoDB behind Next.js, with Redis, RabbitMQ workers and Socket.IO carrying the realtime parts.
Aura Commerce — the marketplace that started life as Nantian 南天 — is a multi-vendor shop: buyers browse a catalogue of 856 products, sellers run their own storefront, and operators manage the whole system from one admin console. Three surfaces, one codebase, one catalogue.
The countdown on the homepage is not decoration — it has to agree with the price. The discount window lives on the product (price + discountPrice + campaign end), and the rail renders straight from the API payload, so a timer can never outlive its discount.
// The campaign carries its own window; the UI renders what the API returns.
const { endsAt, items } = await getFlashSale('active');
// countdown → endsAt, prices → items[].price.discountPrice
Storefront, seller portal and admin console all read the same MongoDB catalogue through the same Express API. A product edited by a seller shows up in the storefront grid, the category page and the admin table without a sync job.
Chat and notifications run on Socket.IO with the Redis adapter, so any worker in the cluster can push an event to a customer connected to a different process.
Order emails, notifications and AI jobs are RabbitMQ consumers with per-queue prefetch and dead-letter queues. The HTTP request returns as soon as the order is written; the slow parts retry behind it.
Mistral (through LangChain) does two jobs: a shopping assistant that answers product questions, and product embeddings stored in product_embeddings so search can match meaning instead of keywords.
Every screen below was captured from the running app — Express 5 on MongoDB Atlas, Redis, RabbitMQ, and the Next.js client.
Captured from the running app
Every screen below was captured from the live stack — route, behaviour, and the implementation behind it. 11 screens
/Hero carousel, a category rail, service guarantees and the flash-sale rail with its live countdown and discount badges.
/categoriesTop-level categories with their subcategory counts and a direct jump into each listing.
/categories/:slugThe dense grid the marketplace is judged on: result count, category chips, price range, rating and brand filters, with four sort modes.
/products/:slugGallery with thumbnails, variant picker, live stock and sold counts, flash-sale price with the struck-through original, quantity stepper and the two CTAs.
/flash-saleCampaign hub with the session countdown, discount percentage per card, sold-progress bars and a full list of discounted products below.
/cartServer-persisted basket grouped per shop, with per-line selection, quantity steppers, a free-shipping bar and a running total.
/checkoutSaved address with edit, per-shop order lines, shipping method and fee, voucher slot, COD or VNPay, and the final total with a place-order action.
/profileProfile, verification badge, counters for orders and favourites, and the tabs leading to address book, shop tools and settings.
/loginSplit-screen sign-in: brand panel on the left, a quiet form on the right with password reveal and recovery link.
/admin/dashboardRevenue, orders, customers and catalogue KPIs with revenue/order charts, recent orders and best-selling products below.
/admin/products856 products with search, category, brand, price and status filters; each row exposes stock, sold count and inline actions.
Behind the product
The parts that are not visible in a screenshot: locking, messaging, retries and payment integrity.
The primary process forks a worker per core so the Node API uses the whole machine; Redis-backed rate limiting and a load-test switch keep the cluster honest.
Where: server-ecommerce/src/server.js
Short-lived access token plus a long-lived refresh token, both httpOnly; refresh hashes are rotated per session.
Where: server-ecommerce/src/services/token.service.js
Login challenges, email verification and password reset codes are one-time keys in Redis with a TTL — the API never stores a raw code.
Where: server-ecommerce/src/services/auth.service.js
Order and notification consumers run outside the request cycle with per-queue prefetch, retry and dead-letter queues.
Where: server-ecommerce/src/workers/order.worker.js
Domain events are written to an outbox collection in the same write as the state change, then published reliably.
Where: server-ecommerce/src/services/outbox.service.js
One Redis serves cached reads, distributed rate limiting, OTP storage and the Socket.IO adapter.
Where: server-ecommerce/src/services/redis.service.js
Buyer↔shop conversations and notifications are pushed over websockets, with the Redis adapter fanning events across workers.
Where: server-ecommerce/src/socket
Sandbox VNPay flow wired through the payment service, with return handling on the client.
Where: server-ecommerce/src/services/payment.service.js
Mistral via LangChain powers the shopping assistant; embeddings stored per product back semantic search and recommendations.
Where: server-ecommerce/src/services/embedding.service.js
prom-client exposes metrics scraped by Prometheus with Grafana dashboards in Compose; permission changes land in an audit collection.
Where: server-ecommerce/src/monitoring