Beafrique — Building a full-stack e-commerce platform for African fashion
An e-commerce platform for African women's fashion, built end to end — frontend, backend, and Stripe payments — to serve local and international customers.
I worked as the Full-Stack Developer on Beafrique, an e-commerce platform focused on African women's fashion, built to make its products accessible to customers beyond a single location. I was responsible for building both the frontend and backend of the platform, as well as integrating Stripe to handle payments for local and international customers.
- Full-Stack Developer
- React · Stripe
- Frontend Development · Backend Development · Payment Integration
The challenge
- The platform needed to let both local and international customers browse and purchase products through a single online shopping experience.
- Because the business could serve customers from different locations, the payment experience was an important part of the project.
- Unlike frontend-only projects, this required thinking about how the product, backend and payment systems worked together as one complete customer journey.
My contribution
- Built the customer-facing e-commerce experience — responsive product and shopping interfaces with React
- Implemented the user journey from product discovery through checkout
- Built the backend functionality required to support the platform
- Connected the frontend with the application's data and services
- Supported the e-commerce and order flow
- Integrated Stripe into the platform and implemented the payment flow for customers
- Tested the payment integration to ensure payments could be processed correctly
Building both the frontend and backend meant taking responsibility for more of the product than just implementing the interface — the different parts of the application had to work together to support the complete customer journey. Integrating Stripe was the most significant new area: it was a payment provider I hadn't worked with before, so I had to understand how the payment flow worked and connect it properly to the rest of the application, treating checkout as a complete experience spanning frontend, backend and payment provider rather than just another UI feature.
A member journey
Stripe was a payment provider I hadn't previously integrated, and the platform needed to process payments correctly for customers in different locations.
I learned how Stripe's payment flow worked and connected it across the frontend, backend and payment provider as one checkout experience, then tested the integration thoroughly to confirm payments processed correctly.
Payments have real financial consequences, so the integration needed to be understood end to end rather than treated as a self-contained UI component.
Impact
- Beafrique launched as a live e-commerce platform for African women's fashion
- Complete e-commerce experience delivered — product browsing through to checkout
- Stripe integrated to handle payments for local and international customers
- First project building and owning both the frontend and backend of a product
Beafrique gave me the opportunity to move beyond frontend development and take responsibility for building the full technical experience — from the customer-facing store to the backend and payment flow. Working across the stack gave me a broader view of product development and the relationship between the interface users see and the systems that power it.
Evidence & recognition — coming soon.