Design a Trust System for Nigeria's Informal Online Sellers

Instagram vendors and WhatsApp group sellers move enormous volumes of goods every day across Lagos, Kano, Abuja and Port Harcourt. Most of them have no Paystack storefront, no business name, and no verifiable address. Buyers rely on screenshots of past transactions and word of mouth. Scams are common, and legitimate sellers lose sales because trust is hard to prove. Existing solutions, like Flutterwave storefronts or Jumia seller profiles, assume the seller has a bank account, a registered business, and digital literacy above a basic threshold. The gap is the hundreds of thousands of micro-sellers who operate entirely through DMs and phone calls. Your task is to design a trust and reputation system for this context. Think about what signals are actually available: phone numbers, social media handles, transaction histories shared voluntarily, community vouching. Your deliverable is a product design document and a set of low-fidelity mockups showing how a seller would build a verifiable profile and how a buyer would interpret it. Good work will show you have spoken to or surveyed at least five informal sellers to understand what they already do to build trust. It will be grounded in what is technically and financially feasible for someone with a basic Android phone and inconsistent data access. Bonus points for addressing how the system handles disputes.