Next.js Ecommerce: Build a Fast and Scalable Shopping Cart App

Building a Shopping Cart App with Next.js and Redux

Next.js, the popular React framework, has gained widespread adoption among developers due to its ease of use and robust features. In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to build a fully functional shopping cart application using Next.js and Redux for state management.

Getting Started with create-next-app

To begin, we’ll create a new Next.js project using create-next-app. Run the following command in your terminal:

npx create-next-app my-shopping-cart

This will set up a basic Next.js project structure for us. Let’s start by cleaning up the initial boilerplate code and setting up our project folders.

Building the Navigation Bar and Footer

First, we’ll create a components folder to hold our reusable UI components. Inside, we’ll create a Navbar.js file and add the following code:
“`
import Link from ‘next/link’;

const Navbar = () => {
return (

);
};

export default Navbar;
“
We'll also create aFooter.js` file with some basic markup. Don’t forget to add styles for both components using CSS modules.

Building the Home Page

Next, we’ll create a CategoryCard component to display our product categories. This component will take two props: image and name. We’ll use Next.js’ built-in Image component for image optimization.

Let’s add some basic styles for our home page and create a next.config.js file to configure our image domains.

Building an API with Next.js API Routes

Before moving on to the other pages, we need to set up an API to fetch our products. We’ll create two API routes: /api/products to fetch all products and /api/products/:category to fetch products by category.

We’ll store our products in a data.json file and use Next.js’ built-in API route features to create our API.

Building the Shop and Category Pages

Now that we have our API set up, let’s build the shop and category pages. We’ll use our custom ProductCard component to display our products.

On the shop page, we’ll use getStaticProps() to pre-render the page at build time. On the category page, we’ll use getServerSideProps() to fetch the data at request time.

Adding Global State Management with Redux

To manage our cart state, we’ll integrate Redux into our Next.js app using Redux Toolkit. We’ll create a cart.slice.js file to handle our cart actions and reducers.

Building the Cart Page

Finally, let’s build the cart page. We’ll use our useSelector and useDispatch Hooks to extract data from the Redux store and dispatch actions.

Modifying the Navigation Bar

To provide feedback when adding products to the cart, we’ll modify the navigation bar to display the cart item count.

That’s it! We’ve built a fully functional shopping cart application using Next.js and Redux. You can find the complete source code on GitHub.