The Front Porch Consignment

The problem

The Front Porch had successfully operated a vendor-mall and consignment model using a custom-built desktop application. The legacy software, known as The Front Porch Consignment Suite, was an Electron-based desktop app that handled everything from vendor payouts to point-of-sale inventory tracking.

As the business scaled to multiple locations and operators began requesting remote access to their vendor data, the limitations of a desktop-bound SQLite application became obvious. Synchronizing data between machines was error-prone, feature updates required manual application patches across all terminals, and there was no way to offer vendors real-time visibility into their sales via a web portal.

The task was clear: port the entire suite to a modern, highly available cloud SaaS architecture—without disrupting the operations of active consignment shops.

Our approach

Because consignment shops deal with highly sensitive financial data, vendor payouts, and proprietary customer lists, a standard multi-tenant database approach (where all clients share a single database table separated only by a tenant_id) presented unacceptable security and blast-radius risks.

We engineered a siloed, one-tenant-per-account architecture on AWS.

Instead of cramming every shop into one database, we treat our infrastructure as code. Every time a new consignment client signs up, an automated deployment pipeline provisions an entirely separate AWS account containing its own isolated database, its own isolated compute layer, and its own isolated API endpoints.

• Next.js handles the unified front-end interface, routing requests securely to the appropriate client backend.
• AWS CDK drives the automated infrastructure provisioning, allowing us to stamp out identical, perfectly configured cloud environments for every new shop.
• Single-Tenant Isolation guarantees that one shop's heavy reporting load or data anomaly can never impact the performance or security of another.

The outcome

The transition from a desktop application to a modern SaaS platform completely changed the trajectory of the software.

• Vendor transparency: Vendors can now log into a dedicated portal on their phones to view real-time sales data, drastically reducing phone calls and administrative overhead for shop owners.
• Zero-downtime updates: Feature rollouts happen instantly in the cloud, rather than requiring users to manually download and install executable updates on their local machines.
• Scale without limits: The single-tenant cloud architecture means the platform can onboard hundreds of new shops without ever hitting a centralized database bottleneck.

"Moving from a local desktop app to a dedicated cloud environment was a game-changer. We have the agility of a modern web app with the security of enterprise-grade data isolation."

— Founder, The Front Porch Consignment