The commerce infrastructure underneath the storefront.
Morphlix designed and built Mercado as a multi-tenant commerce infrastructure platform for African businesses — bringing catalog, inventory, orders, POS, finance, payments, analytics, and storefront operations into one system. Instead of building another marketplace or storefront, Mercado provides the underlying rails businesses can build on, with a no-code control plane that lets non-technical operators run their commerce without engineering support. And because commerce in African markets doesn't always begin in a browser, Mercado is designed around the channels businesses already use — including WhatsApp.
- Timeline
- Venture build
- Team
- Studio team
- Industry
- Commerce · Fintech
- Engagement
- Studio build
Results
10
Commerce services in one backend
Mercado separates account management, catalog, locations, inventory, orders, customers, promotions, finance, AI, and notifications into independently deployable Go services.
121
Console routes across 19 modules
The merchant control plane spans catalog, orders, inventory, customers, finance, promotions, analytics, locations, storefronts, billing, teams, approvals, agents, support, and more.
44
Granular permission actions
Mercado uses IAM-style RBAC with 44 granular actions, allowing commerce operations to be scoped to the people and roles that actually perform them.
The challenge
African commerce is not one channel — and the infrastructure behind it shouldn't be either.
Running a modern commerce business means much more than putting products on a storefront. A merchant needs to manage products, stock, orders, customers, payments, staff, locations, finances, promotions, and reporting — often across multiple channels and locations. For technical teams, building all of those capabilities from scratch creates a large operational burden. For non-technical operators, stitching together separate systems creates another problem: the business becomes dependent on tools that were never designed to work together.
Commerce data becomes fragmented
Products live in one system. Inventory lives somewhere else. Orders, customers, finance, and analytics are maintained separately. The result is a business operating across disconnected versions of reality.
African commerce is increasingly conversational
For many businesses, the customer journey can begin inside WhatsApp rather than on a traditional ecommerce website. A commerce platform that assumes every customer starts by installing an app or visiting a storefront misses an important part of how the market actually works.
Inventory needs to be accurate at the point of sale
A stale inventory number is not merely a technical inconvenience. At the till, stale data can mean accepting an order for stock that no longer exists. That makes consistency more important on merchant-facing workflows than on high-volume shopper-facing reads.
Finance is part of commerce
Orders eventually become financial records. Businesses need more than revenue totals. They need accounts, receivables, payables, assets, reporting, and a reliable representation of the financial state of the business.
Every business has different infrastructure needs
A small merchant may want a managed platform. A larger enterprise may need stronger isolation and control over its own AWS environment. The infrastructure therefore needs to support both without forcing every customer into the same operating model.
Morphlix built Mercado around the idea that African businesses need commerce infrastructure that understands the entire operation — not just the storefront.
The solution
One commerce layer. Every part of the operation.
Mercado brings the core systems behind commerce into one multi-tenant platform. The product provides a technical foundation that developers can build on while giving business operators a no-code control plane for running the day-to-day operation.
The AI layer
AI belongs inside the commerce system.
Mercado's AI direction is built around the idea that commerce intelligence should operate on the underlying business data rather than exist as a generic assistant disconnected from it.
The platform includes an AI service designed for capabilities such as transaction parsing, credit scoring, and conversational commerce, with the broader architecture positioned toward AI-native commerce workflows.
The long-term model is an agent that can work across the same commerce capabilities exposed to the control plane.
The goal is not an AI chatbot for merchants. It is an intelligent layer over the commerce infrastructure itself.
Understand commerce data
AI can work with structured business information rather than relying only on free-form conversation.
Turn business activity into intelligence
Transactions, customers, inventory, and orders become inputs for intelligent workflows.
Bring intelligence into existing operations
AI capabilities can be surfaced inside the merchant console and conversational channels instead of forcing operators into a separate AI product.
Build on the same commerce rails
The AI layer is designed to sit on top of Mercado's domain services rather than becoming a parallel business system.
Technology stack
AWS as both infrastructure and distribution.
Compute
- Amazon ECS Fargate
- AWS Lambda
Data
- Amazon RDS PostgreSQL
- Amazon DynamoDB
- Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
- Amazon S3
Networking & delivery
- Application Load Balancer
- Amazon CloudFront
- Amazon Route 53
- AWS WAF
Messaging
- Amazon SNS
- Amazon SQS
- Redis Streams
Security
- JWT authentication
- IAM-style RBAC
- Tenant-scoped permissions
- Rate limiting
- Idempotency controls
- CORS allowlists
- Graceful service draining
Infrastructure as code
- Terraform
Outcome
A commerce operating layer built for the market it serves.
Mercado brings together the operational systems that typically require multiple products: catalog, inventory, orders, customers, promotions, finance, POS, storefronts, notifications, and analytics.
Underneath that control plane is a domain-oriented backend of ten Go services, with separate data paths for shopper and merchant workloads.
The merchant console now spans 121 routes across 19 operational modules, while the permission model provides 44 granular actions for controlling access across teams and business functions.
The architecture also creates a foundation for multiple distribution models — managed SaaS for businesses that want simplicity and BYOC infrastructure for enterprises that require greater control.
But the larger idea behind Mercado is not another ecommerce dashboard. It is commerce infrastructure designed around how African businesses actually operate.
Mercado is not another storefront. It is the infrastructure underneath the storefront — giving technical teams the rails to build on and business operators the control plane to run their commerce.
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