China-to-Nigeria Vehicle Platform

The Problem

Importing a car from China to Nigeria is one of the most opaque, high-stakes transactions a Nigerian buyer or dealer can undertake. The process involves multiple intermediaries, unpredictable customs costs, unclear shipping timelines, and virtually no visibility once a vehicle leaves Chinese shores. Most buyers have no reliable way to know what a car will actually cost until it's already on the water — at which point they're committed. Dealers and resellers face the same problems at volume. The result is a market built on trust in middlemen rather than trust in process.

The Goal

Build a platform that brings the entire China-to-Nigeria vehicle import journey online — inventory sourcing, real landed cost calculation, order placement, payment, and end-to-end shipment tracking — giving buyers, resellers, and dealers a professional, transparent import experience from first click to Lagos delivery.

My Role

Solo — product architecture, frontend, backend, infrastructure, and payment integration. The platform shares an auth and identity layer with NaijaUsedCars.com under a shared monorepo, which I also own entirely.

What I Built

Live Landed Cost Calculator

The core feature of the platform. Vehicle prices are sourced from partner supply and converted from USD to naira using live FX rates. The calculator applies a full line-item breakdown: RORO sea freight (China → Apapa), port and customs duty as a percentage of CIF using an admin-configured duty table, a demurrage reserve for port delays, clearing agent fees, local delivery from Apapa to Lagos, and the DirecTokunbo service fee. The result is a trustworthy, transparent total landed cost before a buyer commits to anything — solving the single biggest trust barrier in the market.

FX risk is managed by locking the price at deposit, with an automated ops review trigger when delays beyond 48 hours coincide with FX movements greater than 3%.

Paystack-Backed Order Reservations

Buyers secure inventory with a 30% deposit through Paystack and settle the balance before the vehicle departs China. This reduces buyer drop-off, gives the ops team confidence to proceed with procurement, and eliminates the informal "handshake deal" dynamic that characterises most import transactions.

10-Stage Shipment Tracking

Every order follows a 10-stage journey: order confirmed → vehicle acquired → pre-shipping inspection → loaded on vessel → in transit → arrived at Apapa → customs clearance → cleared in storage → out for delivery → delivered. Each stage triggers a relevant notification — SMS, email, WhatsApp, push, or a combination depending on the stage — keeping buyers and dealers informed without requiring them to chase anyone. All events are append-only in the database, creating a full audit trail per order.

Partner-Fed Inventory

Inventory is sourced from verified Chinese supply partners and refreshed on a schedule, with manual upload as fallback. Buyers see a curated, clean selection rather than a noisy classified feed.

Technical Challenges

The landed cost calculator required careful system design — FX rates, duty percentages, and fee structures all need to stay in sync without hardcoding values into the application. The solution was a cost_config table managed by admins, with live FX fed from backend rate sources, so the calculator always reflects real-world conditions without a code deployment.

Designing the 10-stage tracking system for ops reliability was non-trivial. Stages are advanced manually by ops staff through their portals, with the append-only event model ensuring no stage can be retroactively altered — important for trust and dispute resolution.

Building on top of the NaijaUsedCars monorepo while serving a completely different user journey required careful separation of concerns at the routing, auth, and data layers.

Outcome

A live cross-border commerce platform that brings transparency and structure to a process that has historically operated entirely on informal trust. Every core flow — inventory discovery, cost calculation, order placement, payment, and shipment tracking — is functional end-to-end.