E-commerce Website with Payment Gateway (ShopKart)

Anyone can follow a tutorial that renders a product page, but a working online store is a systems problem: money, inventory and trust all have to move together. A customer pays, stock must decrement exactly once, the order must survive a failed payment without charging twice, and an admin needs a truthful view of every order's state. Getting any of that wrong loses real money or real customers. Students often build the storefront and stop there, leaving the hard parts — server-side payment verification, transactional stock updates, role-based admin access — untouched. This project goes through the whole loop: browsing and cart on the front, a checkout that verifies the payment signature on the server before committing the order, and an admin panel that manages the catalog, coupons and order pipeline. It is the complete request cycle of a transactional web application, built to be read, explained and defended.

1. A customer browses the catalog, filters by category or price, and adds products (with variants) to the cart.
2. At checkout, the customer enters or selects a delivery address and proceeds to pay.
3. The server creates a Razorpay order server-side (amount locked, no client tampering) and returns the order ID to the checkout page.
4. The Razorpay checkout modal completes payment in test mode; the server verifies the Razorpay signature before marking the payment as captured.
5. Only after successful verification is the order created, stock decremented and a confirmation shown — the classic "verify before commit" payment flow.
6. The admin panel picks up the new order: statuses move from Placed → Packed → Shipped → Delivered, which the customer tracks on their orders page.

• Product catalog with categories, brands, search and multi-attribute filters (price, rating, sort)
• Product detail pages with image gallery, variants (size/color), stock status and reviews
• Persistent shopping cart (session for guests, database cart for logged-in users)
• Checkout flow with address book, shipping options and order summary
• Razorpay payment gateway in test mode — cards, UPI and netbanking checkout with signature verification
• Order management: confirmation, tracking timeline, cancellation and returns
• Admin panel: product/category CRUD, image uploads, inventory, coupon management, order processing, banner control
• User accounts: registration, login, password reset, order history, wishlist
• Coupon/discount engine: percentage, flat, free-shipping and minimum-order rules
• Responsive storefront with mobile-first design; email-style order notifications

• Full source code (frontend + backend), commented and modular
• Database schema scripts (SQL dump or migrations) with seeded demo products, users and orders
• Project report PDF (synopsis, ER diagram, DFD, design, implementation, testing, conclusion)
• PPT presentation
• Viva Q&A document (payment flow, security, schema questions)
• Deployment guide (localhost setup, shared hosting, environment variables, Razorpay test keys)

FAQs

1. Is payment-gateway integration acceptable in an academic project? Yes — Razorpay in test mode is the standard way to demonstrate payments without moving real money. The project shows server-side order creation, signature verification and transactional stock updates, which is the part worth defending.
2. What demo credentials are included? Seeded logins for an admin account and a customer account, plus Razorpay test cards (e.g. 4111 1111 1111 1111) — the full checkout works end to end on localhost.
3. Can the store be customized for a specific niche, like books or clothes? Yes — categories, attributes and seed data are data-driven, and the report documents the schema so every change is explainable.
4. How is the project deployed for a demo? The PHP build runs on XAMPP or any shared host; the Node build includes a Render/VPS guide. Both are documented step by step, including environment variables and test keys.
5. How is the code organized? Layered — routes, controllers, services, models — with comments throughout. The viva Q&A covers the standard questions: why signatures are verified server-side, how stock is protected from race conditions, and how the ER model fits together.
6. What would it take to go live? Swapping the Razorpay test keys for live keys from a KYC-verified account, adding a real catalog and a domain. Multi-vendor support and logistics integration are documented as extensions.