Study Abroad Platform — Full-Stack WeChat Mini Program

What it is

A WeChat Mini Program connecting Chinese high school students with study-abroad consultants. Students browse consultant profiles, book sessions, and pay via WeChat Pay. Consultants manage bookings and student documents through a separate admin panel.

Key Features

• Consultant Marketplace — search/filter by country, school tier, success rate.
• Booking System — calendar-based slot selection with conflict detection.
• WeChat Pay Integration — native payment flow, webhook for order confirmation.
• Document Upload & Review — students upload essays/transcripts; consultants annotate and return feedback.
• Admin Dashboard — consultant CRM, revenue tracking, booking management.

Architecture

• Frontend: WeChat Mini Program (WXML/WXSS/JS) — feels native on WeChat, which is where the target users already are.
• Backend: Node.js + PostgreSQL on a VPS. RESTful API with JWT auth.
• Payments: WeChat Pay Merchant API — required setting up a business account and handling async payment webhooks reliably.
• Storage: Tencent Cloud COS for document storage (S3-equivalent in China).

What I Learned

• WeChat's Mini Program ecosystem is very opinionated — but that's a feature, not a bug. Following the platform conventions made the UX feel trusted to users.
• Payment webhooks must be idempotent. Duplicate webhook delivery is common; handled with an orders.processed_at timestamp guard.
• Chinese cloud services (Tencent Cloud) have much better performance for China-based users than AWS — the latency difference is significant.

Tech Stack

WeChat Mini Program, Node.js, Express, PostgreSQL, WeChat Pay, Tencent Cloud COS, Nginx, Ubuntu VPS