FoneXpress

Overview

FoneXpress is a live e-commerce platform selling smartphones, tablets and feature phones across Kenya, with 0% EMI financing through KCB Bank. It's a single Node/Express + MongoDB backend that serves four separate React front-ends — the customer storefront, an admin dashboard, a store-operations panel and a franchise portal — each with its own auth scope and feature set. Behind it sits a full retail engine: real-time M-Pesa payments, automated courier dispatch, and inventory tracked across warehouses and physical stores.

The challenge

Selling electronics in Kenya means meeting customers where they actually pay and receive goods: M-Pesa is the dominant rail, deliveries split between same-day city couriers and upcountry logistics, and stock lives across a central warehouse and franchise stores rather than one tidy inventory. On top of that, the business needed not just a storefront but the back-office to run it — catalog, orders, inventory, refunds and support — across head office, individual stores and franchise partners, all from one system.

What I built

• A React 19 + Vite storefront with product discovery, variants, cart, wishlist, loyalty points, coupons and free-accessory rules — plus i18next internationalization and Leaflet-based delivery-zone and store maps.
• Real-time M-Pesa (Daraja) STK Push checkout that streams payment status to the customer over Socket.io instead of polling, with automatic B2C refunds on cancellation and a built-in Daraja callback simulator for safe local testing.
• Three Bootstrap/SASS back-office panels — admin, store and franchise — for catalog, orders, analytics (Recharts), inventory and CMS, built on Formik + Yup forms, data tables and a Jodit rich-text editor.
• Automated multi-courier delivery: LittleCab for same-day local drops and Fargo for upcountry shipping, created fire-and-forget so an order never blocks on a third-party API, with webhook-driven tracking syncing order status.
• Multi-location inventory across warehouses and stores with Goods-Received Notes, inter-location stock transfers and customer/store pullbacks — backed by 61 Mongoose models spanning the full retail domain.
• A hardened Express API: JWT for staff and sessions for customers, Helmet, CORS, Mongo-sanitize, HPP and rate limiting, Sharp-processed secure uploads, PDFKit invoices, Nodemailer transactional email and Swagger-documented routes.

Architecture

Outcome

A live, full-scale retail platform at fonexpress.co.ke — not a demo storefront but the operational backbone for a Kenyan electronics business, handling real payments, deliveries and multi-location stock across customer, admin, store and franchise teams from one codebase.