Multi-Tenant E-Commerce Platform for Beauty & Lifestyle Brands in Kenya
Project Overview
Architected and developed Netai, a multi-tenant e-commerce platform enabling beauty, cosmetics, and lifestyle sellers across Kenya to list and sell skincare, makeup, haircare, and adjacent products under a single, scalable retail infrastructure.
The Challenge
Independent beauty and lifestyle sellers in Kenya lacked affordable, professional e-commerce infrastructure to reach customers beyond informal channels. Kenya's care products e-commerce segment alone was valued at roughly US$55 million in 2024 and is projected to grow at a 14.4% CAGR through 2028, but building individual, full-featured storefronts per vendor would have been prohibitively costly, and generic e-commerce templates didn't account for Kenya's mobile-money-first payment culture or the category-spanning nature of beauty and lifestyle retail (skincare sitting alongside makeup, haircare, and related lifestyle goods).
Our Solution
Built a single multi-tenant architecture allowing each vendor to operate an isolated, branded storefront while sharing core infrastructure, cutting per-vendor cost and maintenance overhead. Implemented tenant-level data isolation, customizable storefronts, and inventory management across sellers, plus local payment integration; a critical design choice given that Kenya's mobile money accounts surpassed 53 million by early 2026, with M-Pesa holding 89% market share, making mobile-money-first checkout a near-mandatory feature for any Kenyan e-commerce platform to gain traction.
Impact & Results
The platform is giving independent skincare sellers, many of whom previously relied on informal channels like WhatsApp and Instagram, a proper multi-tenant storefront with inventory management and local mobile-money checkout. This positions early vendors to tap into a genuinely fast-growing market: Kenya's care products e-commerce segment was valued at roughly US$55 million in 2024 and is projected to grow at a 14.4% CAGR through 2028, reaching an estimated US$94 million. The platform's shared infrastructure amodel is allowing new sellers to launch a branded store without the cost of building their own site from scratch, addressing a real barrier to entry in a market where mobile money penetration now exceeds 100% (53.4 million subscriptions as of March 2026) and M-Pesa alone accounts for 89% of that activity, making mobile-money checkout close to a baseline requirement for any e-commerce platform serving Kenyan sellers.