The situation
Selling Australian goods directly to customers in China is mostly a problem of trust and logistics dressed up as a website. Shoppers expect a Chinese-language storefront and prices in their own currency; the business needs to verify payments that arrive through channels a Western checkout never sees, and to keep inventory and orders straight across the whole thing. Off-the-shelf platforms handle the storefront and quietly leave the hard parts to spreadsheets.
What we built
A full-stack platform that carries the whole flow — eleven modules from catalog and content through cart, checkout, customer accounts, and an admin dashboard. The storefront defaults to Simplified Chinese with English alongside, shows live AUD–CNY pricing, and snapshots the conversion rate at order time so a price can't drift after the fact.
Operations run on an order state machine with a full audit trail, manual payment confirmation for WeChat, Alipay, and bank transfer, and bulk product management by CSV for catalogs that change in batches.
How it works
The app is built on Next.js with Prisma over a Supabase Postgres database, internationalised end to end, with email through Resend and scheduled jobs for the housekeeping. SEO infrastructure, Sentry error tracking, and end-to-end tests were part of the build, not bolted on after launch.
Why it matters
Cross-border retail rewards the businesses that make the awkward parts — currency, payments, language, reconciliation — feel ordinary to the customer. This was a system built around those realities rather than one that pretends they don't exist.