Inkress
A commerce-and-payments platform that lets Caribbean merchants accept cards and run an online business, in a market Stripe, Shopify Payments and PayPal don't serve.
- 14,000+
- orders placed
- Cards + shop
- payments and a marketplace in one
- Caribbean
- built for a market the big players skip
The problem
Most Jamaican and Caribbean merchants can't use Stripe, Shopify Payments or PayPal — those platforms don't operate in the market. Inkress is the alternative: a multi-tenant platform that lets them take card payments and run an online storefront anyway.
What it does
It takes card payments and can switch between payment providers automatically if one goes down, so a merchant keeps selling. Behind every payment is a proper accounting ledger, so the money always adds up.
A separate part of the system does the safety checks on every merchant and transaction — confirming identities, catching fraud, enforcing limits — and the part that actually moves the money only ever acts on those checks. If the checks can't run, it holds the payment rather than taking a chance.
Around that sit a merchant dashboard (verification, statements, disputes, payouts), a marketplace where shoppers can discover and buy from those merchants, tools other developers can build on, and integrations that quietly handle local banking and business-registration paperwork.
Key features
A built-in marketplace
A small merchant doesn't just get a checkout button — they get a storefront and an audience of shoppers already browsing the platform, so they can be discovered, not only paid.
A developer platform others can build on
Merchants (and the tools they use) can extend their own account through a proper developer platform — SDKs, OAuth apps, webhooks — so the ecosystem grows beyond what one team could build alone.
Disputes handled in-app, with evidence
When a customer disputes a charge, the merchant responds with uploaded evidence right in the dashboard instead of losing it by default for lack of a process.
Clear statements and payouts
Merchants see exactly what they've earned and when it lands, with a proper ledger statement they can export — instead of reverse-engineering a processor's summary.
Passwordless sign-in and adaptive checks
Merchants can sign in with a passkey, and a risk challenge only appears at checkout when something actually looks off — so security doesn't mean friction on every honest transaction.
Local rails, handled for you
The tedious local steps — settling to a bank, confirming a business is registered — happen automatically, so a merchant isn't doing them by hand.
Where it stands
In production for Caribbean merchants today, with newer capabilities rolled out market by market.
Under the hood — for the technically-minded
How it's built
At its heart is a double-entry ledger: every payment is balanced entries against merchant accounts, not a flat log of transactions — the model banks use, so the books always reconcile.
Risk and enforcement are kept separate on purpose. One service is the single decision-maker on limits, verification and blocklists; the part that moves money only carries those decisions out. Sensitive card data is isolated behind its own tightly-scoped boundary and tokenized before the rest of the platform ever sees it.
On shared tenancy around that core sit a merchant dashboard, a developer platform, an internal review console, and a consumer marketplace — one system, several products, all under the same account and permissions model.
The hard problems
Taking cards where the global processors won't operate
Rather than depend on a single gateway, the platform works across several processors behind one interface, with fallback if one is unavailable — so a merchant keeps taking payments even when a rail goes down.
Risk decisions that fail safe
Because the money-moving path can't make its own risk calls, a mistake there can't quietly approve something it shouldn't — and when the decision service is unavailable, the system holds rather than assumes. Safe by default under failure, not just under normal conditions.
Keeping sensitive data tightly contained
Card details live inside a small, isolated boundary and are tokenized immediately, so nothing downstream — dashboard, ledger, reporting — ever touches them. That containment is what keeps the platform's compliance footprint small.
Built with
- Elixir/Phoenix
- Postgres
- Redis
- Edge tokenization
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