Why we built this

Most platforms treat African commerce as a localisation problem — the same product with a currency symbol swapped and a payment provider bolted on. That is where the trouble starts. A mobile money payment is not a card payment with a different logo: the customer approves it on their handset, seconds or minutes later, and an order that assumes the money has arrived is an order that ships against a debit that never happened.

So the money model came first. Integer minor units with an explicit exponent, because XAF has no subunit and every assumption of a hundred is a hundredfold error waiting. A double-entry ledger, because a balance column cannot tell you why a vendor is owed what they are owed. Settlement windows and payout batches, because a marketplace that pays out before its return window has closed is financing its vendors without meaning to.

The rest follows from that. Verification schemas are configuration rather than conditionals, so adding a country is a config file rather than a branch. Product types are data, so a marketplace selling cattle and a marketplace selling phone cases are the same software. And every marketplace gets its own database, because the cheapest way to guarantee one operator cannot read another's orders is for them not to be in the same place.