B2B cross-border trade marketplace · UAE ↔ Africa · B2B marketplace / Cross-border trade & commodities
Afro Market (EFG)
A cross-border B2B trade marketplace moving real money through Stripe escrow — an 8-service NestJS backend, real-time chat, a 5-language web app and Flutter mobile apps.
Problem
African suppliers had no trusted digital channel to reach international buyers. Trade happened over WhatsApp and email with no verification, no secure payments and no protection for either side — buyers risked paying for goods that never shipped, and suppliers risked shipping goods they were never paid for. There was no single system to manage supplier onboarding, listings, quotations, orders, payments or disputes.
Solution
A production marketplace built on eight independently deployable NestJS services (auth/KYC, catalog, orders/payments, chat, notifications, media, marketing, push) that each own a PostgreSQL schema and communicate over a RabbitMQ event bus. It moves real money through Stripe Connect: the buyer pays into escrow, funds are held automatically on a payment webhook, the supplier ships, and an admin releases the payout to the supplier's connected account only after delivery is confirmed — so neither side has to trust the other, they trust the platform. Delivered as one React app serving Admin, Buyer and Supplier roles in five languages (with Arabic right-to-left), hardened with 2FA (TOTP), plus offline-first Flutter buyer and supplier apps sharing the same backend and escrow ledger.
Key features
- Escrow-protected Stripe Connect payments with automated supplier payouts
- Supplier KYC & document review, 2FA (TOTP) and role-based access
- Product catalog with an admin approval workflow and bulk Excel import/export
- RFQ & quotation engine threaded like a conversation
- Real-time Socket.IO chat with read receipts, presence and attachments
- 5-language UI (English, Arabic RTL, French, Spanish, Chinese)
- Offline-first Flutter buyer + supplier apps with local caching
Technology
Results
- A real business runs cross-border trades through the platform at api.efgafromarket.ae
- The entire trade lifecycle is automated: onboarding → listing → quote → order → escrow → payout
- A payment-critical, multi-role, multi-language, event-driven system — not a CRUD demo
Want something like Afro Market (EFG)?
Usman Arif builds production web, mobile and POS systems for teams worldwide.
usman.professional01@gmail.com →