An operating system for commerce.

Most commerce tools hand a merchant a prettier storefront. Potter is an operating system for commerce: a merchant describes their business in plain language, Potter stands up a real store, wires in payments, then runs the operations underneath, orders, money, and customers.

I was Head of Design Engineering: I set the visual system, designed across every surface, and shipped the front-end in code.

One person owning the money model, the information architecture, and the components kept a sprawling platform speaking one language instead of three.

Off-the-shelf commerce tools assume the easy path: a card online, a clean state machine.

The merchants Potter is for, a baker in Lagos, a salon in Accra, run on bank transfers with no reference, deposits, and cash on delivery. A buyer sends ₦24,500 with no order number. A client books a slot and never shows. Someone owes a balance that never arrives.

The storefront was never the hard part. The money is.

I didn’t want to design on assumptions, so we ran the wedge through a deep-research pass: dozens of agents, sources adversarially verified, the comfortable claims killed.

The big one: “nobody ships prompt-to-store” was false, Wix already does it. So the wedge sharpened away from generation and toward the jobs actually missing for an African SME. We designed for one real merchant, Amara Cakes in Lagos, not a persona.

The market was racing to ship one thing: a prettier storefront builder. But a storefront is the part that already works.

The hard call was resisting it. A builder is judged on its themes; an operator on whether the money is right at the close of business. I optimised for the second test, because deposits, the balance-due chase, and customer memory are where merchants lose money.

The principle: free where it delights, locked where it transacts. Generation can play with layout and copy; it stays strict around anything that moves money.

Letting Potter build a catalog is easy. Letting it touch money is the design problem, and the rule was simple: confident about content, humble about money.

The wedge ships as a deposit-first booking loop. A client books, pays a deposit on Paystack, and the slot is held; the balance is due in person. Non-refundable inside a cancellation window, so the empty-chair problem is solved by data the order already carries.

Payments run on Paystack in Naira, the platform earns a flat 0.5% through a native split, and a reconciler makes a merchant whole when a settlement lands in the wrong account.

The messier money, reference-less transfers and cash on delivery, is the next layer: every ambiguous case surfaces to the merchant, never auto-confirmed.

Potter is one loop seen from many sides. A customer chats on WhatsApp or Instagram, lands on a real showroom, transacts on Potter’s rails, and the merchant’s one account gets smarter. Order, confirm, deposit, fulfil, reconcile, settled: one path on a real backend.

Most tools make a business fit one model. Potter inverts it: a merchant declares what they do, sell, book, rent, ticket, or subscribe, and that intent decides which flows render. One template contract becomes a shop, a booking site, or a box office.

Every surface speaks the same order, so nothing is re-explained when a merchant moves between them.

A platform hosting thousands of merchants can’t impose its own loud brand on every store, so the decision was restraint.

Potter’s system is monochrome, Squarespace-calm with the density of a Square operator tool, and the merchant’s brand is the only colour on screen.

The thesis was “warm craft, fired with precision”, because in a market of fintech-clean blue and developer-dark builders, nobody owned warm.

Potter went from a research bet to a coherent platform on real rails. The dashboard, the storefront renderer, and the admin console share one design language and one order object, ~250 components shipped in code.

Payments are live on Paystack in Naira: orders, deposits, the flat 0.5% split, and a reconciler that makes a merchant whole when a settlement lands wrong, all in production.

Potter is the most systemic thing I’ve designed: a money model, an information architecture, and a brand, held together by one person in code so they couldn’t drift apart.