Taobao.at: 600+ orders a month by handover

The client purchases and delivers products from China and Hong Kong. Its customers live in Russia, and for many of them the service is a way to buy what has become unavailable or noticeably more expensive in Russian stores. China and Hong Kong are major trade hubs: they sell products of global brands, including European and American ones, often cheaper than in Russia. So customers order not only Chinese products through the service, but also IKEA furniture, Apple devices for the Hong Kong market, clothing and shoes from Farfetch, and computer components.

If an item is not in the catalog, it can be ordered with a purchase request.

The catalog price is in rubles right away and already includes duties, the service fee and delivery. After that an order goes through four steps.

The storefront lives separately from the backend. It is easier to develop, and mobile apps can be built from the same code by adding Capacitor.

• STOREFRONTStorefront

  Nuxt 4 with server-side rendering, Pinia and Nuxt i18n, a UI kit on Tailwind and daisyUI. The server sends the browser a ready page instead of building it on the customer's device. So the catalog opens faster even on a low-end phone, and search engines see every product and bring customers from search.

• ADMINAdmin panel

  An internal site for the service staff that customers never see. In it, operators receive and process orders and purchase requests, check that orders are complete before shipping and update the delivery statuses the customer sees in their account.

• APIPublic API

  Cart, favorites and product blocks for the home page. The guest session relies on a signed cookie, so the customer does not have to sign up in advance.

  • /api/public/v1
  • catalog/block-products
• BACKENDServices and data

  Laravel and Go, queues on RabbitMQ. Data in PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, ClickHouse and S3 / MinIO.

• INFRAInfrastructure

  Docker and Kubernetes, rollout via GitLab CI and Argo CD, traffic through Traefik and Envoy. Monitoring on Grafana, Prometheus and ELK.

The structure and content of a page can change without a storefront release. The backend returns a JSON array shaped like an abstract syntax tree, and the storefront builds the page from it.

The home page is built this way, and its product blocks come from catalog/block-products. Any other page can be built the same way.

For customs clearance the service stores customers' personal data. Sensitive fields are encrypted in the database with Laravel's built-in tools, and the key is stored separately from both the code and the database. Permissions are split between customers, operators and administrators.

I was responsible for three kinds of tests: component tests on Vitest, visual regression tests that compare blocks against reference screenshots, and E2E tests on Playwright for critical scenarios. The junior frontend developer's code went through my review.

A task from its own branch goes into develop, passes the automated tests and code quality checks and is deployed to the test environment. On the planned release date the finished tasks are gathered into preprod, where final testing and acceptance run in an environment identical to production. Then the release is merged into master and updates production without downtime. If something breaks in production, it is possible to quickly return to the previous stable version.

1. develop test environment
2. preprod acceptance
3. master production without downtime

Sprints lasted two weeks. At the end of each one the client saw what was done, what was not and why, and what was planned for the next two weeks.