Getting Started with Commerce Comet
Alright, let’s talk about this little project I’ve been tinkering with, something I started calling ‘Commerce Comet’. Wasn’t sure what it would become at first, just had an idea buzzing around my head about tracking online store stuff more easily.
So, the first thing I did was just grab a notebook. Old school, I know. I started sketching out what I wanted to see. Basically, a simple dashboard. Sales trends, maybe top products, that kind of thing. Didn’t want to overcomplicate it right off the bat.
Next up, data. Where was I gonna get the info? I decided to hook into a sample dataset I had lying around from an old test store. Messy stuff, needed cleaning. Spent a good afternoon just sorting through that, making sure dates were right, numbers made sense. Tedious, but you gotta do it.
Building the Thing
With the data somewhat tamed, I started building the display part. Decided to use some basic web tech I’m comfortable with. Nothing fancy, just HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript to make things interactive.
I focused on getting the core charts working first. I wanted to see:
- Daily Sales
- Monthly Sales
- Top 5 Products
Getting the charts to look clean took a bit longer than I expected. Fiddling with colors, labels, making sure it didn’t look like a mess. That’s always the tricky part, making data look simple.
Then I built a tiny backend piece. Really simple, just something to grab the cleaned-up data and hand it over to the frontend charts when they asked for it. Didn’t need a huge database or anything complex for this stage.
Putting It Together and Testing
Hooking up the front end to the back end was the next step. Made sure the charts were actually pulling live (well, live from my sample data) information. Clicked around a lot. Checked if the numbers matched what I expected.
Found a few bugs, of course. Dates were off in one chart, another wasn’t updating right. Spent some time debugging that. Just console logs and patience, mostly. You know how it goes. Track it down, fix it, test again.
After ironing out the main kinks, I let it run for a bit. Watched how it performed. Seemed okay for what it was. It wasn’t super fast, but it worked. It showed me the sales trends and top products like I sketched out in the beginning.
Final Thoughts (For Now)
So, that’s the journey of getting ‘Commerce Comet’ from a notebook sketch to a working little dashboard. It’s basic, sure. But it does the job I set out for it to do initially. It’s a starting point. Maybe I’ll add more features later, connect it to real store data, who knows. But for now, it feels good to have built this thing, step by step.
