Panda Patches is a custom patch e-commerce platform built with Next.js 16 (App Router) and Sanity as the headless CMS, using Sanity's proxy integration for seamless content delivery. The site serves businesses, sports teams, military units, and brands ordering custom embroidered, woven, PVC, chenille, leather, and printed patches.
Challenges we solved:
Content-driven product pages needed to be fast, SEO-optimized, and easy for non-technical team members to update. We chose Sanity for its real-time editing, flexible schema, and image pipeline with the Next.js proxy pattern for optimized data fetching. Each product page, blog post, and landing page is managed entirely through Sanity Studio.
Checkout integrates Stripe and PayPal with order data stored in Supabase. We built a dual-payment flow where order records are created server-side before redirecting to payment, ensuring no orders are lost even if the customer closes the browser mid-checkout.
CSP (Content Security Policy) was a major challenge with earlier Next.js versions. The build process would strip wildcard characters from CSP strings, breaking third-party integrations like Tawk.to live chat. After upgrading to Next.js 16.2, we migrated to the proxy pattern which resolved these issues cleanly.
What we learned:
Supabase update operations fail silently when columns don't exist or zero rows match. We added explicit column checks after losing order updates to this behavior. PayPal's localStorage-based order data transfer breaks on mobile Safari, so we built a server-side fallback using a dedicated Supabase table.
The blog system publishes 2+ posts per week following a strict SEO golden standard with FAQPage schema, citation-ready sentences for AI search engines, and structured internal linking across 50+ pages.
