BizBora

products page
number of units for a product
upsert catalog item(Product)
view selected products
create a customer and an order
view order and send Mpesa stkpush payment. Record external payment in square
stkpush prompt for mpesa payment

Inspiration

Looking at other parts of the world, businesses have advanced technologies to manage and support their growth. Africa is an emerging continent with its digital space growing. Technologies like Mpesa with over 50 million monthly users can help small businesses in Africa handle payments easily. Using Square can help fuel growth by using their Apis to manage and track data to make meaningful insights. With just a smartphone local businesses in Africa can shift from analog ways of managing data to a more reliable, fast, and efficient way. Just a click of a button can ensure accountability and mitigate losses using a one-stop shop to send, record, and evaluate sales of products.

What it does

Bizbora allows local businesses in Africa to use Mpesa to manage their products and sales efficiently. It allows local businesses to use Mpesa stkpush to send a payment prompt to a customer's phone. This allows the customer to quickly transact without the error of sending payment to the wrong till number or paybill number; all the while recording the payment using square for added accountability. A small local business owner can view data directly from the phone without the need for physical recording prone to loss.

How I built it

I used Squareup Apis to create catalog Objects and list Catalog Objects displayed as products on the products page. On the order page Create Customer API and Create Order API are used to record a customer and an order. An Mpesa stk push API link is called to send a payment prompt to the customer's phone. Create payment API is called and records the payment as an External source. The dart shelf package is used to receive payment results sent by Mpesa stk push.

Challenges we ran into

The square APIs are a bit verbose requiring a lot of try and error in the API explorer. Luckily the documentation is good and example guides are present. Implementing the Mpesa stkpush on the local host server requires a secure callback URL. I had to use ngrok to tunnel to a secure URL but its not permanent.