GIKOMBA MARKET

Gikomba Market is an AI-powered app helping thrift vendors sell online fast, avoid Instagram bans, and build trusted shops with customer rating, all on a mobile-first platform.

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Inspiration

My Project Story

🎯 What Inspired Me

The inspiration behind this project came from a need I noticed in the market for affordable, accessible, and trustworthy secondhand fashion. Many small-scale vendors were struggling to reach customers reliably due to platform suspensions and inconsistent quality checks. I wanted to solve this by building a centralized, community-driven marketplace that empowers thrift sellers while offering buyers a visual and seamless shopping experience.

📚 What I Learned

Through this project, I learned:

  • How to integrate M-Pesa payments through Flutterwave using Bolt workflows
  • The importance of intuitive UI/UX for product discovery in a marketplace
  • How to manage vendor roles, product quality checks, and order flows using visual logic tools

This project deepened my understanding of no-code development and taught me how to structure scalable workflows and user roles in a marketplace ecosystem.

🛠️ How I Built It

I built the project using:

  • Platform/Framework: Bolt (no-code builder)
  • Tools/APIs: Flutterwave for payments (including M-Pesa), Bolt Workflows & Database
  • Databases: Bolt's internal database system
  • Other Tools: Figma for design, Google Drive for planning, Notion for task tracking

The development process involved:

  1. Planning and wireframing the user journey with a focus on Instagram/TikTok-inspired browsing
  2. Designing the UI for product feeds, vendor dashboards, and buyer profiles
  3. Setting up authentication and role-based access control
  4. Building features like product uploads, payments, and order management
  5. Creating admin workflows for quality checks and fulfillment
  6. Testing, collecting feedback, and making iterative improvements

🚧 Challenges I Faced

Like any real project, I ran into some challenges:

  • Technical challenge: Integrating M-Pesa through Flutterwave in Bolt, since the documentation was not always clear
  • Process challenge: Defining scalable workflows for vendor promotion, product review, and payout automation
  • Time constraint: Managing development while coordinating with external testers and vendors

Each challenge helped me grow and pushed me to find creative solutions within the no-code framework.

Thanks for reading my story!

Built With

  • bolt
  • daraja
  • mpesa
  • supabase
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