Hausa Market

Hausa Market had 400 producers wanting to sell online and a Shopify store that could not handle multi-vendor payouts, local delivery zones, or customers paying by bank transfer — which was over half of them. Checkout abandonment sat at 71%.

We shadowed twelve vendors through a full order cycle and found the real bottleneck was not the storefront at all: it was reconciliation. Vendors did not trust payouts because they could not see which orders had actually cleared. We also learned that most buyers shopped on 3G phones, which killed the image-heavy theme.

Two interfaces, one system. Buyers got a fast, text-forward catalogue with progressive image loading and a checkout that accepts cards, transfers and USSD without changing page. Vendors got a dashboard showing every order's payment state, payout schedule and delivery status in plain language.

Next.js storefront with aggressive edge caching and Redis-backed inventory. Two payment providers run side by side behind a provider abstraction, so a failed charge on one retries on the other. Split payouts are calculated at order time and reconciled nightly with a full audit ledger.

A marketplace where a producer in Kano can list stock from a phone, take payment three different ways, and see exactly when money lands — and where a buyer on a slow connection can complete checkout in under a minute.

Checkout completion rose 38%. 420 vendors onboarded in the first year against a target of 150. The platform processed $1.4M in GMV and vendor payout disputes dropped to near zero.