React E-Commerce Listings Webapp

I’m building a lightweight e-commerce platform on the MERN stack and need the first release to focus on clean, searchable product listings aimed at a single Customer role. No cart or payment flow yet—just a fast catalogue that demonstrates the core browsing experience.

Front-end: React (hooks, functional components, responsive design) served by Vite or Create-React-App; styling is flexible, though Tailwind CSS or plain CSS-in-JS are fine as long as the UI stays organised and mobile-friendly.

Back-end: Node.js with Express will expose RESTful endpoints for products. Each item should support title, description, price, images, category tags, and stock count. Authentication can stay simple for now, using JWT to let customers create an account and log in to save favourites.

Database: MongoDB Atlas, with clear Mongoose schemas and aggregation examples for category filtering and keyword search. Please include seed data scripts so I can spin up demo content quickly.

Deliverables
• Git repository containing React front-end, Express API, and MongoDB models
• Postman (or similar) collection covering all product routes
• README with setup, env-var list, and deployment steps to a free tier on Render, Vercel, or Heroku
• Brief hand-off video or document showing how to add new fields to the product schema

I’ll review against these acceptance criteria: build installs with one command, product search works under 300 ms on 1000+ records, and the UI remains responsive down to 375 px width. Let’s keep communication tight in GitHub issues or a shared Trello board so we can iterate quickly.