The problems with African storefronts

When people in Kenya want to sell something online, they usually start with an Instagram account and a WhatsApp number. I used to think this was a stage they would grow out of, and that once a business got big enough it would move to a proper store. But the more sellers I talk to, the more I think the problem is with the stores.

Online stores were designed around a particular kind of purchase. The buyer finds the product, decides on their own, pays with a card, and the seller finds out afterward. Almost everything in Shopify assumes this sequence. Here the sequence is different. The buyer usually wants to talk to the seller first, about the price, or whether it comes in another size, or how much delivery costs to where they live. Then they pay with M-Pesa, or they pay the rider when the package arrives, which means the seller does not know for sure that a sale has happened until after delivery.

So when a seller here sets up a Shopify store, most of the actual selling still happens in WhatsApp, and the store ends up being a catalogue. The conversation is in one place, the payment is in another, and the store, which is supposed to keep track of things, only sees the few orders that went through its checkout. Everything else gets tracked by hand. I think this is why so many sellers try a store for a month and then quietly go back to their DMs.

What would a store look like if it were designed around how people here actually buy? I think the main thing is that it would treat the conversation as part of the sale. Messages from WhatsApp and Instagram would come into the store itself, and an order could start there. It would treat M-Pesa and cash on delivery as normal ways to pay, which means tracking whether each order has actually been paid, since with cash on delivery that can be days after the order was placed. And it would probably charge in shillings, because it is hard to get a small business to pay a bill that changes every month with the exchange rate.

That is what I am trying to build with Staaf. Sellers get M-Pesa, cards and cash on delivery through their own Paystack or Pesapal account, one inbox for WhatsApp and Instagram, and a view of which orders are paid and which are still waiting.

It is early, and I am sure some of my guesses about what sellers need are wrong. But I am fairly confident about the basic idea, because the alternative is to keep asking millions of sellers to change how their customers buy, and that has not worked so far.