Flayona

Flayona is a Ghana-focused e-commerce marketplace for genuine imported (“abrokyire”) goods, sold at fair local prices, delivered by region and paid for via card or Mobile Money. It is a real, live platform — and because it handles money and extends credit, correctness and security sit at its core.

I built the whole system in deliberately lean technology: vanilla PHP and MySQL, server-rendered, installable as a PWA and fast on low-end Android devices. On top of that foundation sit a Buy-Now-Pay-Later engine, KYC onboarding, and four distinct authenticated portals — customer, admin, credit officer and distributor.

Shoppers in Ghana want access to genuine imported goods at fair local prices, with payment options that match how people actually pay — Mobile Money as much as cards — and the flexibility to spread the cost.

Delivering that safely is hard. You need reliable payments across two very different rails, a way to extend credit without getting burned, identity verification before credit is granted, and separate, secure workspaces for the different people who run the business — all while staying fast on cheap Android phones on patchy connections.

The storefront is server-rendered PHP with a shared library of includes for auth, cart, payments, KYC and audit. It ships as a PWA with a service worker for installability and offline read-only browsing.

Pricing is distributor-driven: a master catalogue holds a reference price and the admin's private cost, but the price a customer actually pays is set by the distributor serving their region. Orders carry a kind (standard, pre-order or BNPL) and a fulfilment type (delivery, pickup or rider).

Standard orders take no card online — the customer places the order, receives an invoice with a payment reference (PO number), pays by Mobile Money and confirms on WhatsApp. Pre-order deposits are collected online via Paystack, whose webhook is signature-verified and reconciles the order.

The BNPL engine runs a credit score, generates a digital contract and an instalment schedule, and a scheduled cron job automatically charges instalments as they fall due — all gated behind KYC verification and available to Flayona Plus members.

Each of the four portals has its own authentication guard, TOTP two-factor authentication and password-reset flow, with CSRF protection and an append-only audit log across the platform.

Flayona is a server-rendered PHP application over MySQL (mysqli). Cross-cutting concerns live in a shared `includes/` layer — authentication guards per role, CSRF, Paystack, BNPL, credit scoring, KYC upload, audit logging, mailer/SMS/WhatsApp and region logic — so each page composes the same vetted building blocks.

Four separate portals sit behind their own auth guards: the customer storefront, the admin back office, the credit-officer portal that reviews BNPL applications, and the distributor portal with its own POS, stock and orders.

Payment is asynchronous by design: standard orders resolve out-of-band via Mobile Money and WhatsApp confirmation, pre-order deposits go through a signature-verified Paystack webhook, and a cron job drives automated BNPL instalment charging independently of any user session.

The live schema (30+ tables) is organised around commerce and credit. Customers place orders of order items, settled through order payments; a master products table carries a reference price and admin cost, while distributor_products sets the region-specific price and distributor_variant_stock the stock. BNPL orders link to KYC applications, credit scores and instalments.

Roles are separated at the data layer — admins, credit officers and distributors are distinct account types with their own credentials and TOTP secrets — and cross-cutting tables cover regions, promotions, reviews, loyalty points, Flayona Plus subscriptions and an append-only audit log.