eYote — Commerce Platform with Mobile-Money Payments & Document Intelligence

Full-stack & integrations engineer · Live at eyote.vercel.app

The problem

Most e-commerce infrastructure assumes a credit card and a stable connection. In much of Africa, the payment instrument is a mobile-money wallet, identity is verified by photographing a document, and the customer is on an intermittent connection paying for every megabyte.

That's not a matter of swapping the payment provider. Mobile money is asynchronous and callback-driven, document photos are unpredictable in quality, and payload size is a cost the user actually feels.

What I built

A commerce platform where mobile money is the primary payment rail rather than an afterthought, onboarding takes a photograph instead of a form, and the whole interface is fast enough to use on a weak connection.

Three decisions that shaped it

Payments as a state machine with idempotency keys. Mobile-money callbacks arrive late, twice, or out of order. Anything less explicit double-charges someone eventually. Every transaction carries an idempotency key and persisted state, and a reconciliation pass polls the provider for anything that hasn't reached a terminal state — so a lost callback self-heals instead of becoming a support ticket and a customer who paid for nothing.

Server-rendered, with a strict payload budget. Users pay per megabyte. Shipping a 2MB single-page bundle is a direct cost to the customer, not just a worse Lighthouse score.

OCR as a fast path, not an authority. Extraction runs out of band so onboarding never blocks on it, and every field is human-correctable. A bad photograph shouldn't lock someone out of the platform.

Why this matters for your project

Payment integrations look simple until money goes missing. The failure modes here — lost callbacks, duplicate webhooks, partial state — are the same ones that break Stripe, PayPal, and card integrations. If you're building anything that takes money, this is the experience you're hiring.

Built with: Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL (Neon), PawaPay, Tesseract OCR, Tailwind CSS, i18n