Pacifrica Express: China-to-Africa Cross-Border Logistics Platform

Pacifrica Express and China-to-Africa freight forwarding

Pacifrica Express is a South African freight forwarder that ships goods bought in China — often from Alibaba suppliers — door to door by air. Customers ask their supplier to deliver to the company’s warehouse in Shenzhen; Pacifrica’s partners in China and Hong Kong consolidate, repack and hand the consignment to DHL, FedEx or UPS at preferential rates, and the company clears customs and delivers at the destination. Alongside shipping, it offers sourcing, third-party quality inspection and a full import service for customers who do not hold an import license with SARS, the South African revenue authority.

The business wanted one system to run all of that. The brief to Sigi was a cross-border logistics platform with two connected surfaces: a public customer website that quotes, books, invoices and tracks shipments on its own, and an operations panel where staff validate orders, adjust charges and manage the reference data that pricing depends on. In one scalable system, Sigi automated freight quotes, customs clearance, supplier handling, payments and tracking across Africa.

Why manual freight quotes and customs paperwork did not scale

A freight forwarder’s margin lives in the quote. Air freight is billed on the greater of actual weight and volumetric weight, import duty depends on the product’s HS code and destination, VAT and a clearance fee sit on top, and optional insurance, repacking and consolidation change the total again. Working that out by hand for every inquiry, then chasing waybills and payment confirmations over email, created three problems in particular:

• Every quote was a manual calculation across weight, dimensions, HS code and country, so pricing was slow, inconsistent between staff, and hard for customers to trust.
• Customs handling differed by destination — the company serves 34 countries — and duty rates, clearance fees and airports had to be looked up separately for each order.
• Order status, invoices and waybills lived in inboxes rather than in a system, so customers asked for updates by email and the team had no single view of earnings or open orders.

The stack we built it on

Sigi split the product into a customer-facing React website and a separate admin application, both served by one Node.js and Express REST API on MySQL with Redis in front of it for caching. The customer app is a single-page ReactJS build styled with TailwindCSS; the admin panel is a separate deployment at its own address. Keeping order creation and tracking apart from operational and financial controls was the central design call: customers see prices, statuses and documents, while charge tables, duty rates and earnings adjustments stay behind role-based staff access. The whole product is two small web deployments on one database — the footprint our DevOps and cloud team sets up for teams that want a predictable hosting bill.

Two smaller decisions mattered as much. Accounts are verified by email OTP at sign-up, which keeps throwaway registrations out of a payment-bearing flow. And every order carries one booking status through a fixed sequence — placed with waybill issued, received and validated at the warehouse, invoiced and paid, in transit, at the local hub, delivered — so the customer dashboard and the admin queue read the same record. The waybill is deliberately issued before validation or payment: the supplier has to attach it to the parcel it sends to Shenzhen, so the platform generates the PDF and emails it the moment the order is placed. Incomplete orders are removed automatically after seven days.

How the platform is built and run

The platform splits a customer-facing site from an operations panel over one API, with pricing computed on the server and tariffs the team can change themselves:

• A customer-facing ReactJS site — TailwindCSS styling, Formik-driven forms — and a separate admin application, both served by one Node.js and Express REST API on MySQL, with Redis caching the reference data the calculator depends on.
• A server-side freight and customs engine computes billable weight (the greater of actual and volumetric weight), per-country freight, HS-code duty, import VAT and a clearance fee from the details a customer enters.
• Rates, HS codes, countries and airports are stored as admin-editable tables rather than hard-coded, so staff add a destination or change a tariff without a code release.
• One booking record with a fixed status sequence — waybill issued, received and validated, invoiced and paid, in transit, at the local hub, delivered — read by both the customer dashboard and the admin queue, with incomplete orders removed automatically after seven days.
• Payment after validation by card, Paystack or PayPal, with accounts verified by email OTP at sign-up to keep throwaway registrations out of a payment-bearing flow, and PDF waybills and invoices generated and emailed from the platform.
• Multi-role staff access in the admin panel, so a warehouse coordinator, a finance user and an administrator see different controls, with the React site served by Apache and the Express API answering on a sibling subdomain.
• Design-first delivery: screens designed in Figma with supporting assets in Photoshop and Illustrator, then built as React components against a shared component library.

What we implemented: customer website, calculator and admin panel

Sigi designed, built and shipped both surfaces of the platform end to end. Here is what we implemented across the customer website, the freight calculator and the admin panel.

Customer website: quote, book, pay and track

The public site opens on the promises Pacifrica sells — easy tracking, faster delivery, instant updates, economical shipping — and a getting-started guide that walks a first-time importer through the company’s ten-step process from purchase to delivery. Placing an order is a guided multi-step form rather than one long page, and it follows the operational workflow in order:

1. Package details — dimensions, weight and quantity per package, with volumetric and billable weight calculated live as the customer types. This is the public Get a Quote step, with insurance and repacking-and-consolidation toggles.
2. Supplier details — who is sending the goods to the Shenzhen warehouse, whether Pacifrica should email the waybill to that supplier, and whether the customer wants full services or import services only.
3. Destination and consignee details — destination country selected from the supported list, delivery address and receiver contact.
4. Order summary — freight, import duties, import VAT, clearance fee and any insurance or repacking charges itemized, with a note that instant quotes are estimates and exclude the goods themselves and the supplier’s delivery to the warehouse.
5. Place order — the booking is created, the PDF waybill is generated and emailed, and the order appears in My Orders as pending with a Complete Order action.
6. Payment — once the warehouse has confirmed weights and dimensions and the admin team has validated the order, the customer pays by card, Paystack or PayPal; card payments run through those two gateways rather than a third processor.

That sequence mirrors the ten-step process Pacifrica publishes on its own help page, with the platform running the digital steps automatically. Once an order exists, the customer account offers:

• My Orders dashboard listing every booking with status, total and time, opening into an order detail view with expected and actual hub arrival dates, consolidation details with measured dimensions and weight, and the delivery record.
• Waybill page with print and PDF download — the same document that was emailed at order placement, and optionally sent to the supplier.
• Payments and invoices area with downloadable invoices and any admin-uploaded invoice images.
• Account management — profile updates, password change and reset, all gated by email verification.
• FAQ, support and reviews pages, plus privacy and terms content that the admin team edits without a developer.

Freight calculator and customs duty engine

Inside the order flow the calculator runs behind a Calculate Price action, reading HS codes and per-country prices from dedicated API endpoints, so the admin’s tariff edits reach customers immediately rather than at the next deploy. The quote page restates the rule under the total — billable weight is the greater of actual and volumetric weight, volumetric weight is length × width × height ÷ 5,000 — and the FAQ explains why a box of feathers is billed on space rather than mass, which settles the most common pricing argument before it starts.

Admin panel: validation, earnings and configuration

The admin application, deployed separately as the Pacifrica Express Dashboard, is where the operations team works each order after the customer submits it.

• Order management with photos, invoices and delay notes attached to each booking, and validation before the customer is asked to pay.
• Customer profiles with account controls for the shipper’s record and verification state.
• Earnings dashboard with manual adjustments for cases the automated pricing cannot anticipate, such as a repack that changed billable weight.
• Configuration screens for HS codes, charges, airports and destination countries — the tables the calculator reads.
• Multi-role employee access so a warehouse coordinator, a finance user and an administrator see different controls.
• Content management for FAQ, policy and terms pages.

Delivery and engineering practice

Screens were designed first in Figma, with supporting assets in Photoshop and Illustrator, then built as React components with Formik-driven forms and a shared component library. On the server, Express route handlers for registration and OTP, bookings, the customer dashboard, invoices, and the Paystack and PayPal payment callbacks sit behind authenticated sessions; MySQL holds orders, customers, tariffs and invoices, and Redis caches the reference data the calculator depends on. Both applications run on Sigi-managed subdomains — the React site served by Apache, the Express API answering on a sibling subdomain — and the admin dashboard is a separate staff-only deployment. The work was delivered through our custom software development practice.

The team and expertise behind the build

Pacifrica Express was delivered end to end by one cross-functional Sigi team — product strategists, UI/UX designers, full-stack engineers and QA — working as a single unit rather than handing the build between vendors. Sigi hires only specialists: every engineer is an expert in their own field, and we invest in the team as they deliver, supporting certifications and continuous learning so expert, motivated engineers stay on every build. It is the model we have run since 2016: deep, cross-industry expertise owning the whole stack, from the React and Tailwind customer site and the Node.js and Express API to the customs-and-freight calculation engine and the admin panel behind it. Turning a forwarder’s pricing rules and a 34-country tariff table into software a small team can run on its own is exactly the kind of domain-led engineering our team is built for — the same capability behind our custom software and web application development work.

Outcome: automated customs calculation for 34 destinations

The outcomes are concrete: customs charges are calculated automatically for every supported destination, PDF waybills and emailed invoices replaced paperwork that used to be assembled by hand, and itemized pricing gives customers a transparent estimate before they commit — improving trust and repeat orders. The earnings dashboard and configurable tariff tables also mean the team adjusts rates and adds destinations without going back to the developers.

The customer website is live at pacifricafront.sigisolutions.net, a Sigi-managed subdomain.

Related logistics work and where to start

If your freight, courier or import business is still quoting from spreadsheets, the closest comparisons in our portfolio are the Antrak courier platform for domestic dispatch and proof of delivery, the Shipping Hack parcel forwarding platform for the receiving-warehouse-to-last-mile side of forwarding, the 3D Logistix warehouse management system for multi-tenant inventory, and the broader logistics software services we offer, including web application development for customer portals like this one.

To scope a cross-border logistics platform with a duties engine, waybill automation and an operations panel of your own, contact Sigi and we will walk through your pricing rules and destination list together.