OngolaPhone is a Cameroonian store specializing in smartphones and accessories. In 2024, the founding team came to us with a straightforward goal: launch a functional e-commerce channel in six weeks — before the end-of-year high-demand period.
Project Background
OngolaPhone was already selling several hundred phones per month through its network of physical stores in Yaoundé and Douala. The goal of the e-commerce site wasn't to replace physical sales, but to open a digital channel for the Cameroonian diaspora in Europe and Canada — who regularly buy gifts for family back home.
This type of market has specific constraints you don't find in a typical e-commerce project:
- Payment: Orange Money, MTN Mobile Money, and international credit card
- Delivery: Yaoundé and Douala in 2 days, with SMS notifications
- Audience: bilingual — French for Cameroon, English for the diaspora
- Device: 85% of expected traffic on mobile, including low-end Android devices
The Tech Stack
After a one-week scoping phase with the team, we went with:
Django backend: robust, mastered internally at Coding Industry, well-suited for third-party API integrations. Django REST Framework to expose data for potential future mobile apps.
Frontend: Django templates + TailwindCSS — no heavy JavaScript framework, to ensure high performance on 3G connections and low-end Android devices.
Payments: Orange Money and MTN Mobile Money via their respective APIs, plus Stripe for international credit cards (Europe/Canada diaspora).
Hosting: Ubuntu VPS on DigitalOcean, server located in Europe to reduce latency for the diaspora. Cloudflare CDN for product images — critical on mobile.
The Six Weeks, Week by Week
Weeks 1–2 — Architecture and Catalog
Product catalog modeling (products, color and storage variants, stock levels), customer authentication, persistent cart, checkout flow. Continuous deployment pipeline to iterate fast.
Week 3 — Payment Integration
The Orange Money integration took longer than expected — the official API documentation is incomplete on certain error cases. We used a community library, tested in sandbox, and added an automatic retry layer for the frequent network timeouts. Stripe took one day.
Week 4 — Interface and Mobile Optimization
Full responsive design, tested on eight common Android models in Cameroon (Tecno, Itel, Samsung Galaxy A). Systematic product image optimization: WebP conversion, lazy loading, 80% quality compression. Catalog page load time: under 2 seconds on 3G.
Week 5 — Logistics and Back Office
Admin interface for the store manager: real-time order tracking, stock management, automatic alerts when a product drops below 5 units. SMS customer notifications via Twilio at each order stage.
Week 6 — Testing and Production
150 test scenarios covering critical cases: payment failure, out-of-stock mid-order, network timeout, double submission. Blocking bugs fixed. Production deployment on the last day of week 6, as planned.
Results at Day 60
Two months after launch:
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Orders delivered | 180 |
| Average basket | 47,000 XAF (~€72) |
| Mobile traffic share | 88% |
| Orange Money payments | 62% |
| Card payments (diaspora) | 24% |
| MTN payments | 14% |
| Cart abandonment rate | 31% |
The 31% abandonment rate is above our initial target. The identified cause is the Orange Money SMS confirmation step, which requires leaving the app for 15 to 30 seconds. This is a platform constraint, not a UX problem — and it remains within local market norms.
What We'd Do Differently
Start with payments. The Orange Money integration should have been the first thing developed, not the third. It's the most technically risky friction point in the project — handling it in week 3 put us under pressure.
Plan a 50-customer soft launch. We tested internally and with the client team, but real user behavior always reveals unanticipated edge cases. A limited soft launch before full opening would have absorbed those surprises without commercial impact.
Source code is delivered. OngolaPhone owns the complete codebase. Their internal developer can evolve the site without us — that's the principle we apply on every project, without exception.
Your E-Commerce Project
Every e-commerce project has its own constraints — target market, payment methods, local logistics, audience profile. If you're considering launching an online store, start by describing your context to us: who buys, where, how, and how soon you want to be live.