The Problem We Were Actually Solving
We were trying to build a platform that made it easy for African digital creators to sell their courses, ebooks, and music online. But our platform's payment gateways were failing, resulting in frustrated users and lost sales. We thought our problem was with our users, but it turned out that the issue was with the payment providers.
What We Tried First (And Why It Failed)
We tried using PayPal's "Borderless Payments" feature, thinking that it would solve our problem. However, we quickly realized that it was not enabled for our users' countries. We then switched to Stripe, hoping that their more robust infrastructure would work. But Stripe's "Risk and Compliance" team flagged our users' transactions as "high-risk," effectively blocking them. We tried to work around this by implementing additional verification checks, but it only made things worse.
The Architecture Decision
