Blaia

An online marketplace built around a simple idea: help small, local shops sell online while keeping the personal, "shop around the corner" feel. Instead of nationwide shipping, customers reserve and pay for items online, then collect them in person from a nearby store.

Shoppers can discover shops and products in their town, or expand the search to a chosen distance around them. They browse by category, search and filter, add items to a basket, apply discount codes, and check out with secure card payment — then track their orders and pick them up in-store with a confirmation code. If something goes wrong, there is a fair resolution process.

Shop owners get a full management area: add and edit products — standard items, items sold by weight, and products with options like size, colour, or cut — set prices, stock, and photos, and run time-limited offers. They can import an entire catalogue from a spreadsheet in one go, receive and accept orders, mark them ready for pickup, and get paid out automatically after each sale, with full earnings history. The whole platform is available in their own language.

I delivered the platform end to end: the customer-facing website people shop on, the shop owner and admin dashboard used to run the business, and the behind-the-scenes system that ties it all together — payments, orders, notifications, and email.

I focused on the details that make a marketplace trustworthy and easy to use: a flexible product system with smart rules so listings are always complete before they go live, automatic branded email updates at every step, a smooth checkout, search-engine-friendly pages so shops get discovered, and secure payments with automatic payouts, refunds, and a built-in dispute process.

Each release was tested on the live site before sign-off — real end-to-end checks across browsing, checkout, weight-based products, and search-engine visibility — so shipped features could not silently break.