case study · saas · e-commerce
Shops.co.ke
A complete commerce platform — not a storefront template. Any Kenyan business gets a branded shop, four payment rails and a real vendor dashboard. No developer needed.
The brief
Most Kenyan small businesses sell through WhatsApp status posts and DMs — the same prices typed out every day, orders buried in chat threads, payments confirmed by forwarded screenshots. It works, barely, until it doesn't.
Shops.co.ke gives those businesses a real shop in minutes: a branded storefront, a catalogue with stock tracking, checkout that speaks M-PESA natively, and a dashboard that runs the whole operation from a phone. I designed and built the entire platform — product, payments, discovery and billing — as a multi-tenant SaaS.
What I built
- Multi-tenant storefronts — every vendor gets shops.co.ke/theirshop with their own logo, colours and categories; paid plans connect a custom domain.
- Products, services & digital goods — variants, stock tracking, low-stock alerts and sale prices; service listings take bookings with deposits; digital files deliver via secure expiring links.
- Four payment rails — M-PESA STK push straight to the vendor's Till or PayBill, Paystack for cards and mobile money, WhatsApp checkout with auto-generated invoice links, and manual bank/cash with proof-of-payment uploads.
- Vendor dashboard — orders, customers, analytics and promotions in one mobile-first screen.
- Discovery engine — a public business directory plus "Shops Near Me", searchable by town, county and category.
- Platform wallet — vendors without their own Daraja credentials collect into a shared till and withdraw the same day.
- Server-rendered pages — every shop, product and category page is SSR and SEO-friendly, so vendors rank on Google without doing anything.
- Installable PWA — customers add a shop to their home screen like a native app.
- Subscription billing — free plan for WhatsApp/manual orders; paid plans from KES 299/mo unlock online payments and custom domains. Zero commission on sales.
Under the hood
Multi-tenant architecture with a single codebase resolving tenants by path and custom domain. Payments run through idempotent webhook handlers — STK callbacks, Paystack events and manual proofs all converge on one order state machine. Queue workers handle STK timeouts, receipts and notifications so checkout never blocks on Safaricom.
Where it is now
Shops.co.ke is live and onboarding vendors — from mitumba sellers in Nairobi to salons in Mombasa. It's my flagship build: proof that one developer can ship what usually takes a funded team — product design, payments, multi-tenancy, billing and SEO infrastructure in a single system.
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Like what you see?
Every project here started as a conversation. Tell me what you're building — I'll show you how it ships.