ToolTrust

Inspiration

Fake tools are eating technicians' money in West Africa's largest tech market. Reporting suggests up to 40% of tech gadgets in Nigeria may be counterfeit (TechCabal, 2025), counterfeiting in Computer Village grew ~50% in three years (The Guardian, 2017), and market guides document identical gadgets varying 30-40% in price between streets (Simplvest, 2025). When we interviewed technicians on Ola-Ayeni street, Ikeja, three voices kept returning: fake screwdriver tips that rounded off in a week, a "₦40,000 original" rework station selling for ₦55,000 two streets away, and customers lost when tools fail mid-repair.

ROOT PROBLEM (not symptom): the market has no trusted, low-effort way to verify authenticity before payment or compare prices across sellers. Trust is purely personal ("my guy") — so fakes thrive and restocking burns 2-4 hours walking stalls.

ToolTrust is a mobile web app built WITH and FOR these technicians:

• VERIFIED CATALOG — genuine/OEM-graded tools from vetted suppliers with transparent naira prices (solves price opacity)
• AUTHENTICITY CHECKER — deterministic batch-code scheme (TT-TAG-CHK): checksum + supplier registry gives genuine / invalid / not-in-registry in under 30 seconds (solves the verification gap)
• WHATSAPP ORDERING — basket becomes a pre-filled WhatsApp message to the supplier, then saves under "My requests" (cuts restocking to under 5 minutes)
• COMMUNITY REPORTS — flag counterfeit stalls; suppliers risk losing their verified badge

HOW WE BUILT IT: single-file vanilla HTML/CSS/JS — GitHub Pages deploy, offline-capable, ~26KB, runs on any low-end Android. Verification fails closed: unknown codes are flagged, never guessed. Cart, orders and reports persist in localStorage — no accounts, no server. We rejected "AI authenticity detection" as unverifiable theater and shipped an auditable scheme instead.

CHALLENGES: keeping every interaction under 3 taps for low-literacy users; designing an honesty-first checker that can't be gamed into false positives.

WHAT WE LEARNED: empathy-first design changes the product. Our first instinct was a payments marketplace; listening showed the real pains were verification, price transparency and time — and that WhatsApp is the only rail this market needs.

WHAT'S NEXT: pilot with 3 real Ikeja suppliers, signed QR batch codes, Paystack escrow with technician credit scoring, expansion to Onitsha and Abuja markets, Pidgin/Yoruba voice support.

Demo codes: genuine TT-38IN-2210 / fake TT-38IN-9999. Gemini Gemini response Gemini in Drive doesn't support text files Gemini in Workspace can make mistakes. Learn more

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for ToolTrust

Built With

• css3
• github
• html5
• javascript
• whatsapp