Local Shop Catalog - "Cozy Pantry"

I had an idea, which developed into building a website for local shops where you can browse products and add them to a cart. To order, you click the Order via WhatsApp button, and it opens your WhatsApp app with the order text pre-filled. I built it with Cline, an AI coding agent that runs inside VS Code - it can read, write, and edit files, run terminal commands, and build features autonomously.

The Problem

Small shop owners who sell by phone know the drill - the same questions, over and over, every single day:

"What do you have today?" "How much is the...?" "Do you still have...?"

Every call interrupts work. Every repeated question is time that could be spent elsewhere. And at the end of the day, orders still get mixed up because nothing was written down.

This project reduces that overhead. Customers can browse the full catalog on their own time and see current prices before reaching out - cutting down the back and forth. But it doesn't eliminate phone and WhatsApp communication. The owner still handles every order manually, just with a bit less friction.

What It Does

No apps to install. No accounts to create. No checkout flow. Just a clean product catalog that opens WhatsApp with a pre-filled order message - the way small shop owners already work.

Customer browses catalog → taps "Order via WhatsApp"
→ WhatsApp opens: "Order from..."
→ Owner replies, customer picks up

Limitations

This is a portfolio/MVP project, not a production-ready business tool. A few honest caveats:

• No admin interface - products are hardcoded in products.json. The shop owner cannot add, edit, or remove products themselves. Any catalog change requires a developer to edit the file and redeploy.
• Not a complete solution - there is no inventory management, no order tracking, no payment handling, and no customer accounts. It is a static catalog with a WhatsApp shortcut, nothing more.
• Manual order handling - every order still goes through WhatsApp and is fulfilled manually by the owner.

Stack

Features

• Category filtering — dynamic from products.json, no config needed
• WhatsApp button per product with pre-filled message
• Mobile first — large photos and large tap targets
• Static export — no server, no database, nothing to break

You can visit the website here

Conclusion

This is another project built with Cline, where I tried to build a useful tool for local shop owners. The key was not just accepting the generated code, but actively evaluating it and refining it based on my own experience and judgment.

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