Portal Puff Marketplace

Overview

Built a niche e-commerce platform enabling smoke shop owners to list vape, cigarette, and accessory products with DoorDash-powered on-demand delivery across the United States.

Goals

• Empower individual merchants to manage their own storefronts
• Simplify inventory listing and order management
• Integrate seamless DoorDash fulfillment for rapid deliveries
• Offer basic store customization for branding consistency
• Maintain high security and regulatory compliance

Challenges

• Balancing Django’s server-rendered pages with React components for dynamic modules
• Ensuring real-time stock updates during high-frequency orders
• Implementing a reliable DoorDash integration for diverse delivery zones
• Providing a flexible store customization interface within Django Templates
• Meeting age-restriction and compliance requirements for tobacco products

Solution

We leveraged Django for core backend and templated storefronts, embedding React in key modules (inventory dashboard, order tracker, and store customizer) for dynamic UX. A robust REST integration with DoorDash’s API handles quotes, dispatch, and tracking. Merchants use a single admin console to list products, adjust pricing, and configure branding colors and banners. Real-time inventory sync was achieved via WebSocket channels in Django Channels. Compliance workflows (age verification flags, geo-fencing) were enforced at order time. The platform was containerized on AWS ECS with RDS and S3 for media storage, ensuring scalability and data security.

Results

• Onboarded 50+ smoke shop owners within the first two months
• Average order‐to‐delivery time reduced to 45 minutes via DoorDash
• Merchants reported a 30% increase in weekly sales on average
• Zero downtime during peak vape-drop product launches
• Positive merchant satisfaction score of 4.7/5 on UX and delivery reliability

Technologies Used