Building Codabar: a MERN store from cart to checkout

Why I built Codabar

I wanted one project that went the whole distance — not a toy demo, but a real storefront an electronics retailer could actually run: auth, a working cart, an admin dashboard, and a REST API behind it. That became Codabar, a MERN e-commerce store.

The stack, and why

MERN, deliberately — one language across the whole thing, and a document store that maps cleanly onto products and orders.

• MongoDB — products, users, and orders
• Express + Node — the REST API and JWT auth
• React — the storefront and the admin dashboard

1router.get("/products", async (req, res) => {
2  const products = await });
3  res.json(products);
4});

Watching it come together

Here's the store mid-development — browsing the catalog and dropping items into the cart against the live Express API:

What I'd harden next

Building it showed me whe cart totals, auth tokens that live too long, admin. Shipping was step one — the next pass is putting o break my own checkout.

Takeaway

One real project beats ten tutorials. Codabar forced every layer — data, API, auth, UI, and the admin bgether.