Chinese Wheels cross-border vehicle marketplace

Buying a commercial vehicle from China should not feel like a bet.

That is the problem Chinese Wheels set out to solve. The company already imported vehicles, so they knew the trade, the suppliers and the ports. What they did not have was a way to make the whole journey safe and visible for buyers doing it for the first time.

So we built the platform that does it.

The real problem was never the listing

Anyone can put vehicles on a website. The hard part is everything around the listing.

A buyer in Nigeria is asked to send millions of naira to a supplier they have never met, in another country, for a machine they will only inspect when it arrives. The supplier wants to be paid without chasing a stranger across time zones. And in the middle sits the part most marketplaces ignore: clearing agents, customs and port clearance, where good deals quietly die.

This was never just an online catalogue. It was a trust and logistics platform with a shopfront on top.

What we built

Chinese Wheels is a marketplace with two sides and a supply chain behind it.

• Buyers browse verified vehicles, see real specifications and prices, and pay in Naira.
• Suppliers list vehicles with images, specs and pricing in minutes, and get paid through a protected flow.
• Behind both sides, the platform handles verification, escrow and the handoff to a clearing agent.

We built it on Next.js and Node. The buyer marketplace, the supplier hub, the admin tools and the matching logic live in one system, so the state of a transaction is never split across tools that disagree with each other.

Escrow without the drama

Cross-border trade fails when money moves before trust does. We needed to hold a buyer's money safely and release it only when the agreed conditions are met.

We took a hybrid approach. We used an established payment provider for the safe holding of funds, and built our own layer for the rules, statuses and conditions. Buyers pay in Naira. Suppliers are settled in a currency they can actually use. Every step is recorded, so when a question comes up later, there is a clear answer.

The goal is not to be clever with money. It is that neither side has to trust a stranger. They trust the process.

The clearing agent problem

This was the hardest part of the project, and the reason it mattered.

At Nigerian ports, clearance is where deals go to die. Paperwork, customs, demurrage and agents who disappear. For a first-time importer, finding a good agent is as hard as finding the right vehicle. Most platforms stop at the sale and leave the buyer to sort out the rest.

We did the opposite. The platform matches each purchase with a vetted clearing agent who handles the documentation, customs and port clearance. A buyer does not need to build a network of agents before buying their first truck.

We kept this hybrid on purpose. Software handles the matching and the tracking. People handle the relationships and the exceptions, because port clearance is a human business and pretending otherwise would have hurt buyers.

Verified on both sides

Trust only works if the people using the platform are real.

We combined automated document and business checks with a final human review. Suppliers are verified before they can list. Buyers complete KYC before they can transact. Clearing agents are vetted before they are matched to anyone.

The automation handles the volume. The human review catches the cases that rules miss.

How it works in practice

Three steps, on both sides of the market.

1. Sign up and verify. Create an account and complete the checks.
2. Find and match. Browse verified vehicles, then get paired with the right clearing agent.
3. Pay and receive. Pay safely in Naira, track the shipment and confirm delivery on arrival.

For suppliers it is simpler: list a vehicle with its specs, receive secure payment, and let the platform handle the customs side.

What changed

The platform now carries a real marketplace, with more than 500 verified suppliers, over 10,000 vehicles delivered and 98% customer satisfaction.

Our platform needed to connect two different markets, and Darphiz executed it flawlessly. They built a system that is fast, scalable and easy for both Chinese suppliers and Nigerian buyers to use. S.S Jibia, Chinese Wheels

The more useful change is harder to put in a chart. Buyers no longer gamble on a stranger. Disputes have somewhere to go. Clearance moves faster because the agent is paired before the vehicle lands, not chased after it does. And suppliers, who used to depend on word of mouth, can now reach buyers directly.

What we would do differently

We built too much of the verification ourselves.

If we started again, we would hand KYC and KYB to a third-party provider from day one and keep our own people for the final review. That would have removed a large amount of custom development, moved the launch faster, and let us spend our engineering on the parts that are actually ours: the marketplace, the escrow logic and the clearing agent matching.

Verification is a solved problem. We did not need to solve it twice.

Build with us

If you are building a marketplace that moves real money across borders, the listing is the easy part. The trust layer, the payment flow and the logistics are where the business is won.

We have built this. Let us build yours.

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