ShopWise Kenya : E-Commerce Platform

Project summary

ShopWise Kenya is a full-stack e-commerce platform designed to provide a complete online shopping and store management experience tailored to the Kenyan market.

The platform combines a responsive customer-facing storefront with a comprehensive administrative dashboard, allowing customers to discover products, manage shopping carts, place orders and make payments while administrators manage products, inventory, customers, orders, promotions and other store operations.

The system integrates Safaricom's Daraja API for M-Pesa STK Push payments and supports Google OAuth authentication alongside traditional customer registration and login.

Built using PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, Bootstrap 5 and JavaScript, ShopWise demonstrates the development of a complete, database-driven e-commerce application with an emphasis on security, data integrity, maintainability and practical business workflows.

Problem & purpose

Many small and growing businesses need an affordable, manageable online shopping solution that brings together product catalog management, inventory control, order processing and locally accessible payment methods.

The challenge was to develop an integrated e-commerce system that provides customers with a seamless shopping experience while giving administrators centralized control over business operations.

Particular engineering challenges included maintaining accurate inventory during concurrent purchases, securing customer and administrator authentication, handling payment callbacks reliably, managing order lifecycles and ensuring that sensitive administrative operations are protected.

My role & responsibilities

Role: Full-Stack Developer & System Architect

I independently designed and developed the ShopWise platform, taking responsibility for both frontend and backend implementation.

My contributions included:

- Designing the application architecture and relational database structure.
- Developing the responsive customer storefront and administrative dashboard.
- Implementing customer authentication, registration, email verification and Google Sign-In.
- Building product, category, variant and inventory management functionality.
- Developing shopping cart, checkout, order processing and payment workflows.
- Integrating Safaricom Daraja API for M-Pesa STK Push payments.
- Implementing administrative access controls, session security and audit logging.
- Developing automated acceptance tests and database integrity safeguards.
- Preparing the application for deployment on cPanel hosting.

Architecture & capabilities

Key Features

1. Customer Shopping Experience
- Responsive product catalog and product detail pages.
- Product search, category filtering and browsing.
- Shopping cart and wishlist functionality.
- Customer registration, login and Google Sign-In.
- Email verification and password recovery.
- Secure checkout and order confirmation.
- Verified customer product reviews.

2. Administrative Management
- Centralized administration dashboard and business metrics.
- Product and product-variant management.
- Inventory tracking and stock management.
- Order processing, status management and refunds.
- Customer management.
- Coupon and promotional management.
- Delivery zones and distance-based pricing.
- Customer messages and review moderation.
- Staff management and administrative audit logs.

3. Payment & Transaction Processing
- Safaricom Daraja API integration.
- M-Pesa STK Push checkout.
- Payment callback processing and verification.
- Payment status tracking and order reconciliation.
- Automated order expiry and inventory restoration.

4. Security & Reliability
- PDO prepared statements and database constraints.
- Session-based administrative access control.
- Brute-force protection.
- Secure image upload handling.
- Audit logging for sensitive administrative activities.
- Transaction-safe inventory operations.
- Isolated automated testing using a dedicated test database.

Architecture

The application follows a modular PHP architecture with a clear separation between the public storefront, administrative interface, application services, database layer and protected configuration.

The backend uses PHP and PDO to communicate with a relational MySQL/MariaDB database. Bootstrap 5 and vanilla JavaScript provide the responsive user interface.

The application is designed for deployment on Apache-based cPanel hosting, with the public web root separated from sensitive application files.

Tools & frameworks used

Results & key takeaways

Successfully developed a comprehensive, database-driven e-commerce platform that brings together customer shopping, store administration, inventory management, order processing and payment integration within one application.

Key outcomes include:

- Delivered an integrated customer storefront and administrative management system.
- Implemented end-to-end shopping and checkout workflows.
- Integrated M-Pesa STK Push payment processing through Safaricom Daraja.
- Implemented Google authentication and customer account management.
- Established inventory consistency safeguards and transaction-aware order processing.
- Developed automated acceptance tests and database isolation mechanisms to improve application reliability.
- Prepared a modular application architecture suitable for shared-hosting deployment and future expansion.

The project demonstrates practical full-stack development, API integration, relational database design, application security and software testing.

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