A catalog with no cart (on purpose)

Mogadget is a gadget catalog for a single Lagos retailer, and it ends where most e-commerce sites begin: there is no cart and no checkout. A customer browses, then orders over WhatsApp or Instagram.

The missing feature is the feature

It's tempting to read "no cart" as unfinished. It isn't — it's a product decision. This retailer already closes sales in chat. Bolting on a checkout would add a payment integration, an order-state machine, and a fulfilment flow to duplicate a conversation the owner would rather just have. So the site's only job is to be a fast, trustworthy catalog that turns an intent into a well-framed WhatsApp message.

Less surface, less to break

The stack stays honest to that scope: Next.js + MongoDB + Redis, built on the Model → Service → Route triad and tested with Vitest + Playwright. With no checkout, there's no cart-abandonment edge case, no payment reconciliation, no half-finished order to clean up. The complexity you don't ship is complexity you never have to operate.

The lesson

Matching software to how a business actually sells often means building less. Mogadget is the small, clean proof of that: the right amount of app for the job, and not one endpoint more.