Briz Market — Local Shopping Marketplace for Nepal

Briz is a local marketplace for Nepal that connects shoppers with nearby stores. Shoppers browse products and stores around them, or request something they can't find; local sellers respond with offers showing price, availability and distance. The two sides then compare, chat and agree on payment and pickup directly.

Briz first launched as a mobile app — 'Briz - Shop Locally' on the App Store, and on Google Play for Android. I built the web version at brizmarket.com as a Frontend Engineer at Karobar Digital, from the first commit on 7 September 2026 to the Phase 1 launch on 9 October 2026.

Phase 1 brings discovery to the web: the home page, categories, store and product pages, search, location-based distances, recently viewed products, and the contact and feedback forms. Actions that aren't on the web yet — requesting products, adding to cart, becoming a seller — hand off to the mobile app through the App Store, Google Play or a QR code.

The web app will be built out into the full Briz product in later phases. The codebase was set up for that from the start: each new capability becomes its own feature folder, and types for planned features such as product requests and the wishlist are already in place.

For shoppers: you need a product, but you don't know which nearby store has it, so you call around or walk from shop to shop. For sellers: you have the product, but the customers around you don't know it. Briz fixes both sides with one loop — request, offer, chat, order.

The codebase uses four layers that only import downward: app (routes) → widgets (page sections) → features (stores, products, search, location, categories, app download and more) → shared (UI primitives, hooks, utilities, the API client). Features never import each other and expose a single public index.ts, and the three largest — stores, products and search — are split into sub-features such as listing, detail, filters, operating hours and reviews.

Every call to the Briz API goes through one function, apiFetch, from a server render or a Server Action. It adds the country code and the visitor's guest session. The browser never calls the API directly.

The location picker combines a Leaflet map, OpenStreetMap place search and a 'Locate Me' button. The chosen spot is saved in a cookie and stays inside Nepal. Without a location, distance tags hide and 'Nearest' sorting is disabled, so the page never shows misleading distances.

The header search shows live results as you type (debounced at 300ms, capped at a few products and stores), cycles its placeholder through daily suggestions from Briz's intelligence API, and remembers recent searches. Submitting opens a full results page with Products and Stores tabs, sorting and price filters.

'Load more' lists mirror their loaded pages into the URL, so a shared or refreshed link restores the same items, and browser back restores them too. Home page sections keep their last data in memory, so returning to the home page shows content immediately instead of skeletons while fresh data loads.

A request proxy gets a guest session for first-time visitors before the page renders. If the API returns a server error or doesn't answer, the app checks a maintenance flag in Firebase Remote Config and sends visitors to a friendly maintenance page instead of a broken one.

Pages are server-rendered with per-route metadata and Schema.org structured data — Organization and WebSite on the home page, Product with Offer on product pages, and ItemList collections for listings. Sitemaps for stores, categories and products are generated by the API and served from the web domain, and the social preview image is a JPEG under 300KB so WhatsApp shows it.