BaneleHlela/mall

A vendor commerce and social platform for township markets in South Africa — storefronts, bookings, and a website builder, built for entrepreneurs without technical skill or expensive tooling. # The Mall A vendor commerce and social platform for township markets in South Africa — storefronts, bookings, and a website builder, built for entrepreneurs without technical skill or expensive tooling. ## Problem & vision Millions of entrepreneurs and small businesses across South African townships operate without access to the digital tools, structure, or visibility that formal e-commerce platforms assume — capital, technical readiness, and self-driven marketing chief among them. The Mall combines the accessibility of social media, the structure of e-commerce, and the connectivity of a professional network into one platform, starting with a focused pilot in eMadadeni before expanding to other townships and the wider informal business sector. ## Features - **Vendor storefronts** — orderable products, bookable services, rentals, and donations, each with their own image galleries and management flows - **Drag-and-drop website builder** — customizable store websites, currently being rebuilt into a component-registry architecture (canvas + design tokens + reusable primitives) - **Search Posts** — merchandising content vendors create to surface products/services on the platform's search and discovery page - **Social posts feed** — a home-page feed distinct from Search Posts - **Booking flow** — service, staff, and date selection for appointment-based vendors - **Store owner dashboard** — order, content, and store management for vendors - **Admin dashboard** — platform-wide oversight - **Auth** — email/password plus Google and Facebook OAuth - **Payments** — PayFast integration - **Notifications** — email and WhatsApp messaging ## Tech stack **Frontend:** React 19, TypeScript, Vite, Redux Toolkit, React Router, Tailwind CSS v4, Framer Motion, MUI, Radix primitives (shadcn pattern), `@dnd-kit`, Tiptap 3 **Backend:** Node.js, Express 5, Mongoose / MongoDB, Redis, Passport (Google/Facebook OAuth), JWT, Google Cloud Storage, Puppeteer/Playwright (screenshot capture) …