Taking a home appliance showroom nationwide online

Burq Electronics sells major home appliances from a showroom in Daska, Punjab. The catalogue is deep — several hundred SKUs across ten-plus categories from more than twenty brands — and the dominant payment method in the market is cash on delivery, not cards. We built a Next.js storefront designed around those two facts rather than around a generic ecommerce template.

The situation

Burq Electronics is a home appliance and electronics retailer operating from a showroom in Daska, Punjab, carrying major brands — Haier, Samsung, Dawlance, Hisense, Gree, Kenwood, Orient and others. The business worked, and it worked in one town.

The gap was reach. A customer three hundred kilometres away had no way to see what was in stock, compare an inverter AC against the next model up, or buy without travelling. "Quality you can trust, prices you can afford" is a promise that only lands if people can see the prices.

Two constraints that shaped everything

The catalogue is the product

This is not a boutique with twelve items. It is 89 air conditioners, 84 LED TVs, 60 refrigerators, 52 automatic washing machines, and on down through microwaves, geysers, deep freezers and cooktops — several hundred SKUs across more than ten categories.

At that depth, browsing is the whole experience. Someone shopping for a fridge is comparing capacity, brand and price across dozens of near-identical options, and the site's job is to make that comparison fast rather than to be beautiful. Category structure, filtering and honest product imagery matter more than any hero animation.

Cash on delivery is the default, not an edge case

In this market most customers pay cash when the item arrives. That is an operational fact with real design consequences, and it is where imported ecommerce templates tend to fall down — they assume payment happens at checkout and treat COD as an afterthought.

It is not an afterthought here. It changes what checkout has to collect, how orders are confirmed before dispatch, and how much the business is exposed on a refused delivery of a washing machine.

What we built

A Next.js storefront, server-rendered so that category and product pages are fast on mid-range Android phones over mobile data — which is what most of the traffic actually is, and a constraint that quietly rules out a heavy client-side build.

• Category-first navigation across ten-plus appliance categories, so the deep catalogue is browsable rather than searchable-only.
• Product pages carrying the specifications people actually compare on — capacity, type, brand, price — rather than marketing copy.
• Optimised, responsive imagery throughout: a catalogue this size is mostly photographs, and unoptimised photographs are the whole page weight.
• Cash on delivery as a first-class checkout path, alongside nationwide delivery coverage.
• Brand and category landing pages, so searches for "Haier inverter AC" have somewhere to land.

Why server rendering, specifically

For a catalogue business, rendering on the server is not a preference — it is the difference between being found and not. Product and category pages need to be in the HTML for search engines to index hundreds of SKUs, and they need to paint quickly on a phone that is not a flagship.

A client-rendered storefront can look identical in a demo and be effectively invisible to a crawler and slow on the devices the customers actually hold.

Where it landed

The showroom's catalogue is now visible and purchasable across Pakistan, with delivery nationwide and payment on arrival. The structure — category-first, server-rendered, image-optimised — is built to absorb more SKUs without a rebuild, which for a retailer adding brands and models each season is the part that matters most.

What we would tell you to take from this

• Catalogue depth is a design constraint. At several hundred SKUs, comparison and filtering are the product.
• Payment norms are local. A market where cash on delivery dominates needs checkout and order confirmation designed around it, not bolted on.
• Server rendering is not optional for retail: hundreds of product pages have to be indexable, and fast on mid-range phones over mobile data.