What It Takes to Build a Kenyan Marketplace That Handles M-Pesa

The hardest part of a marketplace is not the listings. It is the moment money changes hands between two strangers who have no reason to trust each other, on a payment rail where the customer can simply walk away from the PIN prompt.

Kaziiko is Mycrea Technologies' own product, which makes it the honest case study: every awkward decision is still visible in it. If you are commissioning something that takes payments between users, these are the parts worth asking your developer about.

Money has to sit still in the middle

A client pays before work starts, and the expert is not paid at that moment. The amount is held, the order moves through its stages, and the expert is paid out after the client confirms delivery. That holding step is the whole product. Without it, the first bad order ends the marketplace.

It also means you need a status for every state money can be in — paid, in progress, delivered, confirmed, disputed, refunded — and a rule for who can move an order to each one. Writing that table down before any code is the cheapest hour you will spend.

M-Pesa fails more often than you plan for

STK push sends a PIN prompt to the customer's phone. Plenty of those prompts are never answered: the phone is off, the balance is short, the customer changes their mind, or Safaricom times out the request. Each case comes back with a different result code, and your site has to tell them apart and say something useful to the customer.

Build the failure path first, not last. The question to ask any developer quoting on M-Pesa work is simple: what does my customer see when the payment does not go through, and what does my dashboard show? If the answer is only about the happy path, the integration is half finished.

Verification is a product decision, not a badge

Kaziiko shows a verified mark on experts who have submitted documents and been checked. The temptation is to make that automatic. The reason not to is that the mark is the only thing a first-time client has to go on, so it has to mean something slower and more boring than a signup flow.

You can see the result on the experts directory — more than 40 service categories, from KRA and tax work to design, each with its own listings and prices.

Certificates only count if a stranger can check them

Kaziiko Academy issues a certificate after a course and a quiz, at KSh 999 a course. A certificate that lives only in the holder's inbox is worth very little to the employer reading the CV, so every one has a public verification link that anyone can open without an account.

That is a small feature with a long tail: it means the certificate can be put on a LinkedIn profile and actually checked, which is the only reason a paid certificate is worth buying.

What to take from this if you are commissioning a build

Three questions, in order. Where does the money sit while the work is being done? What happens when the payment fails? And what can an outsider verify without logging in? A team that has shipped this before will answer all three without reaching for a sales deck.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can a Kenyan business take M-Pesa payments on its own website?

Yes, through Safaricom's Daraja API with a shortcode of your own. The work is in handling the callback and the failure cases correctly, not in showing the PIN prompt.

What is escrow on a marketplace?

The buyer's payment is held by the platform rather than passed straight to the seller, and released once the buyer confirms the work was delivered. It is what makes a first order between strangers reasonable.

Who built Kaziiko?

Mycrea Technologies, a Nairobi software company. It still runs the platform, and takes on client builds through its profile on Kaziiko.

Can I learn to build this instead of hiring?

The Web Development course on Kaziiko Academy covers building and launching for Kenyan clients, and is KSh 999.