INSA Shop

As a member of the Service Informatique Associatif, a student association at INSA Lyon that builds web applications and platforms for other associations and for campus life, I worked on the platform for INSA Shop, the school's official store.

INSA Shop is run by students on a voluntary basis, and until then they were tracking sales and stock in Excel spreadsheets. This was workable at a small scale, but fragile as soon as the catalogue and the number of orders grew. They needed a single platform that would let them manage products, collections, stock, availability and orders, while also serving as an online shop where students could browse and buy their products.

A React front end with a Next.js backend. Within the team, I owned the product management side and contributed to the dashboard.

What I worked on:

• Product variations : The core of the product page was handling variations (size, colour, material) where a single product exists in many purchasable combinations, each with its own stock and availability. Modelling this cleanly was the most demanding part of the feature.
• Product lifecycle : Full creation, editing and deletion flows for products, designed so that store managers could maintain the catalogue themselves without any technical support.
• Payment history : A record of every transaction with its receipt, covering both online orders and in-person sales at the store, so the team has a single, reliable view of everything sold rather than two disconnected sources of truth.
• Management dashboard : I helped design the landing page for managers, surfacing the figures they actually act on. For example : best-selling products, total sales, most recent orders, and products running low on stock.

I joined this association because I wanted to work on projects that students actually use, alongside a team of developers from my own school, and to contribute to campus life beyond my coursework and personal projects.

The most valuable part of this project was working directly with the INSA Shop managers. We started by gathering their needs to define the specifications, then held regular intermediate meetings to show our progress, collect their feedback and refine or add features accordingly. Presenting the work to them meant dropping the technical vocabulary entirely and explaining what we had built in terms that made sense to them. That constraint sharpened my ability to communicate with clients.

Another interesting aspect of this project was working along with a team of developers. We split the work into tasks, agreed on deadlines, and coordinated our efforts to deliver a coherent product. This was my first experience working in a team on a real project, and it taught me how to collaborate effectively, share knowledge, and integrate different pieces of work into a single application.

The application is now used by the students working at INSA Shop across every INSA campus in France, and the customer-facing version is currently in development.