Moving Your Business Online: A Checklist for Nigerian Shop Owners

You already have the hardest parts: products, suppliers and customers who trust you. Going online is addition, not reinvention.

Start with your best sellers

Do not list everything. Take your ten strongest products online first. You will learn what the channel needs before committing your whole catalogue.

Photograph properly, once

Set aside an afternoon, use daylight and a plain background, and shoot everything at once. This is the step people postpone and the one that most affects sales. The AI assistant will clean up the backgrounds and write the descriptions.

Decide who handles online orders

An unassigned online channel gets ignored during a busy shop day. Name a person, even if that person is you at a fixed time each evening.

Keep stock honest across both

Selling the same item in-store and online is the fastest way to lose a customer. Update stock as sales happen, in both directions.

Tell your existing customers

The people already buying from you are your first online buyers. A note at the counter and a WhatsApp broadcast will outperform any advertising in the first month.

The cost of trying

The risk here is smaller than it looks. The worst case is an afternoon spent photographing your stock properly — and you will still have the photographs, whatever you decide about selling online.