Building a full e-commerce platform for UwU.lk in three weeks
A full e-commerce platform for UwU.lk, a Colombo-based online gift and accessories store — built solo in about three weeks on AWS Amplify Gen 2, with a custom admin suite and a receipt-verification checkout suited to how small Sri Lankan stores actually take payment, now under the same organic-growth monitoring process as the rest of this series.
Freelance Full-Stack Engineer — solo build plus ongoing SEO monitoring
Built Feb–Mar 2026 (~3 weeks) · organic-growth monitoring ongoing since launch
UwU.lk sells cute gifts and accessories online, delivering across Sri Lanka from Colombo. Rather than a hosted storefront platform, it needed a genuinely custom build: an admin team managing categories, customers, orders, and pre-orders themselves, and a checkout that matched how customers in this market actually pay.
The challengeSmall Sri Lankan e-commerce doesn't always have easy access to instant card-payment gateways the way larger, established businesses do, so the checkout needed to treat bank-transfer-plus-receipt-verification as a first-class path, not an afterthought bolted onto a generic cart. The admin side needed real operational tooling — categories, customers, orders, pre-orders — not just a product list, since day-to-day store operations run entirely through it.
Approach
Built the whole platform on AWS Amplify Gen 2 (Cognito auth with a post-confirmation handler, Amplify Data for the product/order schema, S3 storage for product images and uploaded payment receipts) rather than reaching for a hosted e-commerce SaaS platform — full control over the exact checkout and admin flow this business needed.
Designed the checkout around how customers actually pay: bank transfer details displayed inline, a receipt upload straight to S3, shipping options, gift wrapping, and a card note — a genuine four-step order flow (cart → checkout/pay → send receipt → confirmation), not a generic one-size cart.
Built a full admin operations suite — categories, customers, orders, pre-orders, contacts, and services — so the store team runs day-to-day operations from the same platform instead of juggling spreadsheets alongside it.
Reused and adapted a per-page SEO admin pattern from a similar dashboard built for another client engagement — structured metadata (title, description, keywords, OG image, canonical URL) editable per page without a code change, plus a dedicated SEO health dashboard for the management team.
Instrumented Search Console from launch, same as every organic-growth engagement in this series — measuring real query and ranking data on a brand-new domain building visibility from zero, rather than guessing.
What shipped
Full customer commerce flow: product catalogue, cart, wishlist/favourites, accounts with order history, and a receipt-verification checkout.
Admin operations suite: categories, customers, orders, pre-orders, contacts, and services management.
Per-page SEO admin (structured metadata editable without a deploy) plus a dedicated SEO health dashboard, adapted from a pattern built for another client engagement.
AWS Amplify Gen 2 backend: Cognito auth, Amplify Data schema, S3 storage for product images and payment receipts.
Ongoing Search Console monitoring since launch, tracking a brand-new domain building organic visibility from zero.
Scale of ownership
~3 weeks
Built in113
Commits (solo)7
Admin modules shippedOngoing
Organic-growth monitoringTwo things worth naming plainly: the payment flow here isn't a compromise on a "real" e-commerce build — receipt-verified bank transfer is how customers in this market actually prefer to pay, and building around that instead of forcing a card gateway nobody would use is the right call, not a shortcut. And the SEO dashboard wasn't started from scratch — it's the second time a version of that tool has shipped for a client in this series, which is exactly the kind of internal leverage that makes a three-week solo build of a full e-commerce platform realistic instead of reckless.
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