stur africa · merchant portal + storefront

Multi-tenant commerce platform for African businesses

Frontend — merchant portal and multi-tenant customer storefront

What it is

Stur is a commerce platform for African businesses — 150+ of them run custom-branded online stores on it. I own the frontend across its two halves: the portal where merchants run their business, and the storefronts where their customers shop.

The merchant portal

Point of sale, product and booking catalogs, order management, delivery zones, payments — plus an Instagram automation suite that turns comments and DMs into checkouts. Merchants build keyword-triggered response workflows and test them in an interactive chat preview before going live.

The storefront and its AI assistant

Every merchant gets a themed store on shared infrastructure — carts, service bookings, invoices, and multiple payment channels.

The storefront also ships a conversational AI shopping assistant: customers chat to find products, check order status, and check out. The assistant fills the cart and hands off to real checkout, and every view state is synced to the URL, so a refreshed or shared conversation lands exactly where it left off.

Engineering highlights

  • Tenant isolation

    Carts stay scoped per storefront on a shared domain — no leakage between merchants' stores in the same browser.

  • Theming without the flash

    Each merchant's brand color is injected at the server layer and shared by both utility styles and the component library, so pages never render unbranded.

  • Checkout without friction

    Guests get an account created silently at checkout — registration, login, and order placement chained into a single submit.

  • An inbox that stays consistent

    The merchant inbox reconciles real-time socket events with cached queries, pulling only the changes — so multiple open sessions stay in sync without hammering the API.

Stack

Next.jsReactTypeScriptTanStack QueryZustandSocket.io