Case study
Habbal Jewellery: A Unified Commerce Platform
Habbal needed one platform, one catalogue, and one admin, with seven different ways of transacting on top — something off-the-shelf platforms handle badly or not at all. We built seven modules on a single Medusa.js backbone over six months, including a configurable-products admin the client runs without a developer or a release.
Jewellery & commerce · Habbal Jewellery runs seven businesses in one: retail, brokered sales, loose diamonds, B2B auctions, bespoke commissions, configurable requests, and wholesale.
The brief
One platform, one catalogue, one admin — with seven ways of transacting on top. Off-the-shelf platforms handle retail well and the rest badly or not at all.
What was built
- Retail storefront for finished pieces
- Brokered marketplace sales between buyers and sellers
- Loose diamond sales, chosen by specification
- Timed B2B auctions with access rules for trade buyers
- Bespoke commissions that start as a conversation and become an order, including replicating sentimental pieces
- Configurable jewellery requests — the hardest module: the client builds each item's configuration flow in the admin, and the frontend renders forms and pricing it was never specifically written for
- Wholesale with trade pricing, quantities, and accounts on the same catalogue
The hard part
Why Medusa over a hosted platform: catalogue, inventory, orders, and payments as extendable code rather than configuration to work around. That trade-off — owning more of the stack — is why this took twelve sprints over six months, not four. The configurable-products module was the hardest piece specifically: the client needed to define each item's configuration flow themselves, from the admin, and have the storefront render forms and pricing that didn't exist when the code was written. That's a product engineering problem as much as an implementation one.
Outcome
Habbal adds new configurable pieces from the admin with no developer or release. All seven sales channels read from the same stock and the same admin. Auctions and wholesale moved off phones and spreadsheets onto the platform.
Credit
Delivered by Abdullah Amir as part of an agency engineering team. [TBD: confirm team/agency name before publishing]