eCom Babes Member Portal
Shopify embedded member portal app — Remix + Express + Prisma + Clerk auth + S3 + real-time chat
Client
eCom Babes
Industry
EdTech / Women in Ecommerce
Year
2024
Scope
Shopify App · Remix · TypeScript · Real-time
0K+
Students served
Remix + Polaris
Frontend
Socket.io
Real-time
0
Year
The challenge
eCom Babes is a 20,000-student community teaching women how to launch ecommerce stores — '42-Day Launch Framework,' live mentorship from seven-figure store owners, 24/7 support, and a private community. Their member portal needed to live inside Shopify, with a custom data model for courses, lessons, mentorship, and student progress.
Off-the-shelf Shopify apps couldn't model the curriculum + community + real-time mentorship workflow. The team needed a custom embedded app with its own auth (Clerk), file storage (S3 for video lessons), real-time chat (Socket.io), and a Postgres schema for course/student/mentor relationships — all running inside Shopify Admin.
Approach
01
Embedded Shopify app on Remix + Express
Built with Shopify's Remix template, custom Express server, App Bridge, and Polaris. Authenticates via Shopify OAuth for merchant admin and Clerk for student-facing flows.
02
Custom Postgres schema via Prisma
Designed a Prisma schema covering courses, lessons, students, mentors, sessions, and student progress. Migrations + seed scripts maintained as part of the deployment pipeline.
03
Clerk + JWT auth layer
Clerk for student identity, JWT + bcrypt for server-side session management. Single coherent identity model spanning the embedded merchant admin and the customer-facing portal.
04
S3 file pipeline for course media
AWS S3 + Multer for course video and lesson asset uploads. Signed URLs for secure media delivery. Streaming-friendly for the 20K-student catalog.
05
Real-time mentorship via Socket.io
Live chat between students and mentors via Socket.io — async-first, but supports synchronous Q&A sessions when mentors are online.
06
Docker + Heroku deployment
Containerized via Docker, deployed on Heroku with CI/CD. Prisma migrations run as part of the release script.
Results
Embedded Shopify app live for eCom Babes
Course, lesson, mentorship, and progress modules in production
Real-time chat handles live mentorship sessions
S3 file pipeline supports the full course library
20K+ student community served from the portal
Stack
Shopify AppRemixReactTypeScriptExpressPrismaPostgreSQLShopify PolarisApp BridgeClerkJWTAWS S3Socket.ioTailwindViteDockerHeroku