A founder came to me with a simple requirement:
- 100+ products
- Customers need to browse products
- Customers need to place orders through WhatsApp
- No online payments
- No monthly Shopify subscription
The interesting part?
He didn't need a traditional ecommerce platform.
He needed a simple way to display products and receive orders.
The Problem
The original idea could easily turn into a large ecommerce application:
- User accounts
- Authentication
- Shopping cart
- Checkout
- Payment gateway
- Order management
- Email notifications
- Product management
- Inventory
- Hosting infrastructure
But most of these weren't actually required.
The business only needed:
Products → Cart → WhatsApp order
So we started there.
What We Built
The customer-facing side has three main steps:
- Browse products
- Add products to the cart
- Send the order directly to WhatsApp
The admin panel handles:
- Adding products
- Editing products
- Uploading product images
- Setting prices
- Managing inventory
There is no unnecessary checkout flow or payment system.
The Architecture
For this MVP, we intentionally kept the architecture simple.
Frontend
Next.js
The customer website and admin interface are built with Next.js.
Hosting
Vercel
The application can be deployed on Vercel's free tier, which removes the need for a traditional server for this MVP.
Database
Supabase
The product data is stored in Supabase using its free tier.
The goal was to avoid paying for infrastructure before the business had validated the idea.
Why We Didn't Build Payments
The founder didn't need online payments.
Customers were going to place their orders through WhatsApp.
Adding Stripe or another payment provider would have introduced additional complexity without solving an actual business problem.
So we didn't build it.
The same principle applied to authentication and email notifications.
If a feature isn't needed to validate the business, it can wait.
The $0/Month MVP
With this architecture, the initial infrastructure cost can be $0/month using the free tiers of Vercel and Supabase.
That doesn't mean every ecommerce business can run indefinitely for free.
As traffic, storage, database usage, or business requirements grow, paid infrastructure may become necessary.
The goal here was different:
Validate the business before paying for infrastructure.
What I'd Add Later
If the business starts getting real traction, we can introduce features based on actual needs:
- Online payments
- Customer accounts
- Order tracking
- Automated notifications
- Advanced inventory management
- Analytics
- More powerful admin features
- Better order management
The important part is that these features can be added later.
We don't need to build everything on day one.
The Bigger Lesson
Good engineering isn't about building the biggest system possible.
It's about understanding the actual problem and choosing the simplest architecture that solves it.
In this case, the business didn't need Shopify.
It needed a product catalog and a way to turn a customer's cart into a WhatsApp order.
So that's what we built.
Start with what the business actually needs.
Then add complexity when the business earns the right to need it.
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