, 1 min read
My first client was a grocery store in Naic
A year into coding, a local store asked for a website. I built the whole thing: catalog, cart, GCash payments, receipts, and a stock ledger that never forgets.
- Freelance
- PHP
- E-commerce
I started coding in 2022. In August 2023, Jayann's Store, a grocery in Naic, asked if I could put their store online. I said yes before I fully knew how.
It's PHP 8.2 and MySQL/MariaDB, built from the database schema up to the storefront: a catalog with filters, a cart and checkout, customer accounts, PDF receipts, and an admin panel for the owners.
The ledger
The thing I'm still proud of is the stock. Instead of a single number that gets overwritten, every inventory change is recorded in an append-only ledger. That one decision made everything else easy: stock adjustments, a history for each product, CSV export, and reorder reports that tell the owners what's running low.
Customers pay with GCash. Because real money and real accounts were involved, I learned security properly: prepared statements everywhere, hashed passwords, a hardened Apache config, and my own PHP smoke and checkout tests before every change went live.
It's still at jayann-store.free.nf. It isn't my most advanced project, but it's the one where someone first trusted me with their business.