Reusable E-commerce Platform with Admin Panel: Bakery & Herbal Stores

Overview

A reusable e-commerce platform built with Laravel and PHP, designed to help businesses manage their online stores through a centralized admin panel. The platform has been deployed for two businesses in Pakistan: FreshBakes, a traditional bakery, and Hikmat, a herbal remedies store.

Both stores use the same underlying codebase and administration tools while maintaining their own branding, product catalogs, pricing, and website content. This makes it possible to launch stores for different businesses without rebuilding the entire e-commerce system from scratch.

Results at a Glance

• 2 live stores: FreshBakes and Hikmat running on one reusable platform.
• 1 centralized admin panel: Manage each store's core e-commerce operations.
• 16 product categories: Seven bakery categories and nine herbal product categories across both stores.
• Promotional pricing: Original prices, discounted prices, and percentage-off badges in PKR.
• Complete shopping workflow: Product browsing, cart, customer login, and checkout with multiple payment options.
• Storefront features: Featured products, brand filters, FAQs, customer reviews, and policy pages.

The Challenge

Small businesses need a practical way to sell online without depending on a developer for routine changes such as adding products, updating prices, launching discounts, or editing website content.

The objective was to build an e-commerce system that owners could manage independently while making the underlying platform reusable for businesses with completely different products, branding, and content.

Two Stores, One Platform

The platform currently powers two distinct online stores. Each has its own identity and product catalog, while both share the same application structure and administrative functionality.

• FreshBakes: A traditional bakery store offering rusk, cake rusk, bakarkhani, biscuits and cookies, bread and buns, cakes, and bundles. Visit FreshBakes.
• Hikmat: A herbal remedies store offering safoof powders, syrups and sharbats, majoon pastes, herbal teas, distillates, oils, face washes, and other products. Visit Hikmat.

Store-specific branding, products, prices, and content are kept separate, while the shared platform handles the common e-commerce functionality.

The Storefront

Each store provides a customer-facing shopping experience tailored to its product range. Customers can browse by category or brand, explore featured products, view detailed product pages, and compare original and discounted prices.

The shopping workflow includes adding products to a cart, customer login, and checkout with multiple payment options. Both storefronts also include supporting content such as About, Contact, FAQ, customer reviews, and policy pages.

Product Catalog and Promotions

The shared platform supports different product catalogs without requiring separate e-commerce applications. FreshBakes and Hikmat can organize their products into their own categories and brands.

Promotional pricing allows stores to display regular and discounted prices together, with percentage-off badges that make active offers easy for customers to recognize.

The Admin Panel

Both businesses use centralized administration tools to manage their online stores. The admin panel provides the core controls needed for day-to-day e-commerce operations.

• Products and images: Manage product information and catalog images.
• Categories and brands: Organize products for each business.
• Pricing and discounts: Maintain product prices and promotional offers.
• Featured products: Control which products receive additional storefront visibility.
• Orders and customers: Manage customer and order information.
• Store content and settings: Maintain branding, website information, and content pages.

This shared administration approach reduces the need for custom development whenever a store owner needs to make routine updates.

Reusable Platform Architecture

Instead of maintaining two completely separate e-commerce applications, both stores run on the same underlying Laravel platform. Business-specific information, including branding, products, prices, and content, is configured for each store while the common application functionality is reused.

This approach provides a foundation for launching additional stores with less duplicated development and a consistent set of administrative tools.

Technology Stack

• Backend: Laravel
• Programming language: PHP

Laravel powers the shared e-commerce functionality, including product management, storefront operations, shopping workflows, and administration.

My Role

I developed the reusable e-commerce platform and set it up for both FreshBakes and Hikmat. My work covered the shared store functionality, customer-facing shopping experience, and administration workflows used to manage products, categories, brands, pricing, promotions, and website content.