Building an E-commerce Backend: Auth, Cart, and Transactional Orders with Prisma

This is the second stage of my CodeAlpha Full Stack internship — two projects, built in a deliberate order so the patterns from the first carry forward. First was a project management tool (auth + real-time updates with Socket.io). This one is a store: products, cart, orders. Same stack — Express, Prisma, PostgreSQL, JWT — but the interesting part isn't the CRUD, it's the order-placement flow, which is the first genuinely transactional piece of logic in the whole internship. I'll walk through th