Sparkle Commerce

Sparkle Commerce is a Shopify-style commerce platform for African merchants, built by Ampstem for Sparkle Microfinance Bank. Merchants get their own online store, a dashboard to run the business, and payments that settle into a Sparkle bank account. I built the backend on my own, most of the merchant dashboard, and the storefront and landing site.

Sparkle Commerce merchant sign-in

What I built

Multi-tenant platform: One PostgreSQL database with every record scoped to a store. Authentication resolves the token, account and store in a single query, and one person can be a merchant, a staff member and a customer on different stores.
Store builder: Drag-and-drop page sections with schemas defined per theme, a form renderer with 17 field types, draft and publish snapshots, and a live preview that updates over a typed postMessage protocol without reloading the page.
Storefronts: A Next.js app that routes each store's subdomain to its own storefront, with per-store sitemaps and customer sign-in by email one-time code.
Payments and wallets: A payment gateway layer with Paystack and Sparkle virtual accounts (temporary per checkout or permanent per merchant), HMAC-verified webhooks that are safe to receive twice, and merchant wallets on a double-entry ledger. Every transaction must balance, fees and commission post as their own entries, payout holds reverse if a transfer fails, and a scheduled check flags any drift between the settlement pool and the ledger.
Merchant dashboard: Products with variants, stock across locations, collections and Shopify CSV import; orders, abandoned checkouts, customer segments, analytics, staff roles and permissions, and subscription billing.

Stack

Area	Tools
API	Python, Django, Django REST Framework, PostgreSQL
Merchant dashboard	React, TypeScript, Vite, Redux Toolkit, Tailwind CSS
Storefront & landing	Next.js, TypeScript
Infrastructure	Docker, S3-compatible file storage