A full-stack tech retail platform covering storefront, POS, CRM, repair tickets, inventory, and double-entry accounting — built with Next.js, Firebase, and Tailwind CSS.
Desktop Traders sells and repairs computer hardware, which means it needed something most small Kenyan retailers don't: a system that handles a storefront, a till, a repair queue, and real accounting, all pointing at the same underlying data. Selling a laptop, tracking a repair ticket for a customer's machine, and knowing what's actually in stock had been three disconnected problems, usually solved with three disconnected tools — or none at all, just a notebook and memory.
A generic e-commerce template wasn't going to cut it. This needed a genuine business system, built around how a tech retailer actually operates day to day: sales, service, and stock, all talking to each other.
The platform is built on Next.js for the frontend — chosen over a simpler static approach because the retail and admin sides needed real routing, server-side rendering for the public storefront's SEO, and a component structure that could support eight distinct modules without turning into unmanageable spaghetti. Firebase handles auth and data persistence; Tailwind CSS keeps the UI consistent across modules built at different points in the project without design drift creeping in.
The eight modules cover the full operational loop: public storefront, point-of-sale, customer relationship management, repair ticketing, inventory management, and a double-entry accounting layer sit alongside admin and reporting views. The core design decision was making inventory the shared source of truth — a sale through the POS decrements stock in real time, the same stock figures show on the public storefront, and a repair ticket that consumes a spare part draws from that same inventory count. Nothing is tracked twice in two places that can quietly drift out of sync.
The accounting module is genuinely double-entry, not a simplified income/expense log — every POS sale, refund, and repair invoice posts to the ledger automatically, which means the business gets real financial statements out of day-to-day operations instead of needing to reconstruct them separately at month-end.
Repair ticketing tracks a device from intake through diagnosis, parts ordering, and completion, with status visible to both staff and, where relevant, the customer — turning "come back in a few days and we'll see" into an actual trackable process.
Desktop Traders is the largest scope project on this page, and the clearest proof that TechGPT builds full business infrastructure, not just websites, when a client's operation actually needs it.