CreativelyNanda.co.za

The goal from day one: not a static brochure. A cultural destination — the professional credibility of LinkedIn, the seamless commerce of a digital storefront, the literary community of a poetry platform, the editorial authority of a long-form publication, all in one. Every architecture decision was written with a rationale. PayFast over Stripe: Stripe doesn't process ZAR-denominated cards directly for SA merchants without complex setup. PayFast has ~60% market share in SA, supports EFT and instant EFT (dominant payment methods in ZA), and processes in Rand natively. For a site targeting SA students and entrepreneurs, Stripe adds friction and currency confusion. PayFast was always the correct choice for this market. Supabase over Firebase: Firestore's document model would require denormalising the product-order relationship that Postgres handles naturally with foreign keys and indexes. Supabase provides full PostgreSQL, Row Level Security at the database layer (orders readable by buyer, not other users), and signed Storage URLs for digital delivery — all without custom code. Zustand for the cart: the cart must persist across App Router navigations and survive browser refreshes. The critical pattern is skipHydration: true on the store, with rehydrate() called after mount — this prevents the 'cart flicker' where server HTML shows an empty cart but client state has items. TypeScript caught the PayFast signature bug before production: the PayfastPaymentData interface ensures every field passed to the signature generator is accounted for. A type error in the PayFast signature function would cause silent revenue loss. TypeScript strict mode on payment code costs nothing at build time; the same error in production costs revenue.