Delivering locally without a courier

Your buyer is in Surulere. You're in Yaba. The whole thing is a fifteen-minute ride, and somehow you're on a courier's website filling in a postcode field that means nothing here.

You don't need a courier for that drop. You need two or three riders whose numbers are in your phone, a price agreed before the parcel leaves your hands, and a rule about who pays when the buyer doesn't pick up. A Lagos dispatch service quoted mainland-to-island at ₦3,000 to ₦7,000 for a parcel under 5kg in August 2026, and within-Lagos runs anywhere from ₦3,000 to ₦12,000 depending on distance, size and how badly you need it today. Those numbers move with fuel, so treat them as a shape rather than a price list.

The rest of this is how to run that properly instead of texting a different rider every time and hoping.

What actually moves a quote

Riders don't price by kilometre. They price by how much of their day you're taking, and once you understand that you stop being surprised by quotes.

What changes the price	Why
Distance, roughly	The obvious one, and the least important
Crossing to the island	Third Mainland at the wrong hour is an hour of his day
Time of day	A 4pm drop into Lekki costs more than the same drop at 10am
Waiting time	Every minute at a locked gate is unpaid unless you agreed otherwise
Parcel size	Anything that won't fit between his legs or on the back rack
How many drops on the run	Three drops on one route is not three times one drop
Whether he collects cash	He's now carrying your money and your risk
Notice	"Now now" costs more than "before 12 tomorrow"

The two that sellers forget are waiting time and cash collection, and they're the two that turn a good rider relationship sour after a month.

The rider who knows your area is worth more than the cheapest quote

Nigerian addresses aren't addresses. They're directions. "Behind the mosque on Ojuelegba Road, second gate after the yellow building, ask for Mama Nkechi" is a perfectly good delivery instruction and no mapping app will ever understand it.

A rider who's worked your area for two years reads that and goes. A rider from an app who's never been there calls your buyer four times, gets lost, calls you, waits at the wrong gate and eventually brings the parcel back. Same parcel, same distance, two completely different outcomes, and the difference was never the price.

So the goal isn't finding a rider. It's finding two, and keeping them. Ask other sellers in your market or your estate group. Ask the vendor whose packaging you buy. Ask your buyers, because half of them have a rider they use. When you find one who does three clean drops in a row, save his number properly, learn his name, pay him the day he asks and don't haggle him down ₦500 on a job that went well.

The cheapest rider is the one you don't have to call twice.

The conversation to have before the first parcel

Ten minutes of agreement on a phone call saves you a month of arguments. Get all of this settled and write it in the chat so it exists in writing:

1. Price per area. Not per drop. Give him your four or five common destinations and get a number for each, so nobody negotiates per parcel forever.
2. Waiting time. How many minutes are included, and what happens after that. Ten free and ₦500 per extra fifteen is a normal shape.
3. Failed drop. If the buyer doesn't answer, who pays? Say it out loud now. A rider who gets nothing for a failed attempt will stop attempting hard ones.
4. Return of the parcel. Same day or next morning, and to where.
5. Cash. If he's collecting, when does he remit and how. Same day is the only answer that works.
6. Proof. A photo of the parcel with the buyer, or the gate, or the receipt, sent to you before he leaves the spot.
7. His days off. Because you need to know before you promise a Saturday.

Point 3 is the one people skip and it's the one that matters most. If a failed drop earns your rider nothing, then a difficult buyer is a job he wants to fail quickly. Pay something small on a failed attempt that comes with a photo and a call log, and watch how much harder he tries at the gate.

Zones you can actually price

Don't quote per delivery. Build three or four zones, price each one, and put them on your shop page so the buyer picks. Zones stop the negotiation and they stop you under-charging when you're busy.

A Lagos shape, with your own numbers filled in:

Zone	Areas	What you charge	What you pay the rider
1	Yaba, Surulere, Ebute Metta	₦2,000	₦1,500
2	Ikeja, Maryland, Gbagada	₦3,000	₦2,500
3	Lekki Phase 1, VI, Ikoyi	₦5,000	₦4,000
4	Ajah, Sangotedo, Ikorodu	₦7,000	₦6,000
Pickup	My place, by arrangement	₦0	₦0

The gap between the two columns isn't profit. It's your buffer for the drop that waits forty minutes, the one that has to be re-attempted, and the ₦500 you'll end up adding when the rider says traffic was terrible. If you set the two columns equal, every unusual delivery comes out of your margin.

Add pickup as an option even if only one buyer in twenty uses it. It costs you nothing to offer and it's the cheapest order you'll ever fulfil.

Batching is the whole saving

One drop to Lekki is a trip. Four drops to Lekki is still basically one trip, and a rider will do the extra three for far less than the first.

That means the single most valuable operational change you can make is a delivery day per zone. Island on Tuesdays and Fridays, mainland daily. Say it on the product page. Most buyers genuinely do not mind waiting until Friday if they knew on Monday that Friday was the day, and the ones who do mind will pay you a rush fee, which is a much better conversation than eating a ₦4,000 single trip.

Four Lekki drops on Friday at ₦6,000 total is ₦1,500 a drop against ₦4,000 each done separately. You collected ₦20,000 in delivery fees. That difference is the closest thing to free money in this whole business.

Set the batch day, then hold it. The temptation to make an exception for one buyer is enormous and it undoes the entire arrangement, because the rider now has no idea which day is real.

If the rider is collecting cash

Cash on delivery is normal here and pretending otherwise loses you sales. But the moment a rider carries your money as well as your stock, you're running two systems and only one of them is visible.

Two rules cover most of it. Pay per parcel, not per naira, so the rider has no reason to touch the amount. And reconcile the same day, every day, against a written handover, not against your memory of what went out.

The full routine for that, including the handover sheet and what to do when a rider is short, is in rider handovers and cash reconciliation. If cash on delivery itself is the part you're unsure about, cash on delivery for small sellers covers refusal rates and deposits.

The better answer, where your buyers will accept it, is that the rider carries no money at all. Send your account details with the order confirmation, get the transfer before the rider leaves, and the drop becomes a handover of goods only. Your buyer keeps the reassurance of seeing the parcel before you ship. You keep the money out of the loop.

When you should just use a courier

Local riders are the right answer for same-city, same-day, one-to-five drops a day. They're the wrong answer for several things, and it's worth being honest about which:

• Anything going to another state. Use an interstate courier. A rider is not going to Ibadan for you at a sane price.
• More than about fifteen drops a day. You've become a dispatch coordinator, and that's a job. Either hire for it or hand it to a logistics company.
• Anything you need proof for. A rider's WhatsApp photo is decent proof. A courier's scanned tracking record is better, and if you're selling anything above ₦100,000 you want the record.
• Fragile or high-value items where insurance matters. Riders don't carry cover. If you drop a ₦250,000 device, that's yours.

Growing past riders isn't a failure. It's the normal shape of things, and most sellers do both for a long time: riders for the city, a courier for everything else.

Worked example: Chidera, thrifted denim, Yaba

Chidera sells thrifted Levi's out of a room in Yaba at ₦12,000 to ₦18,000 a pair, mostly through Instagram, about 45 orders a month. She was charging a flat ₦2,500 for delivery anywhere in Lagos and paying whichever rider replied first.

Her March numbers: 45 orders, ₦112,500 collected in delivery fees, ₦168,000 paid out to riders. She was subsidising delivery by ₦55,500 a month, on a business making around ₦5,000 margin per pair. That's eleven pairs a month sold to cover her own delivery, and she'd never sat down and worked it out.

Three changes:

1. Four zones instead of a flat rate, priced as the table above, published on her shop page.
2. Island on Tuesdays and Fridays, said clearly in the product description and repeated in the order confirmation.
3. Two regular riders, one mainland and one who does the island runs, both on agreed zone prices, both paid ₦800 on a failed attempt with a photo.

April: 41 orders, slightly fewer, ₦146,000 in delivery fees collected, ₦119,000 paid out. She's ₦27,000 up on delivery instead of ₦55,500 down, a swing of ₦82,500 in one month. Four buyers complained about the island days. Two of them paid the rush fee.

The bit she didn't expect: her failed-drop rate fell from about one in seven to one in eighteen, and she's fairly sure that's the ₦800. A rider who's paid for trying rings the buyer three times instead of once.

What Sailo does here, and what it doesn't

Sailo's delivery methods are exactly the shape of a zone list. Each one has a name the buyer sees, a flat fee, an optional free-over-this-amount rule, and a free-text estimate where you can write "Island runs go out Tuesdays and Fridays". You can add a collection method with your address and opening hours for buyers who want to come and get it. The buyer picks at checkout, and the choice is saved onto the order.

What it won't do: there's no distance calculation. Nothing checks that the buyer in Ajah picked the Ajah zone rather than the cheaper Ikeja one, so on a big order it's worth reading the address before you dispatch. There's also no rider dispatch, no route building and no proof-of-delivery capture. Sailo holds the order, the address and the total. The riding is yours.

And on the money: bank transfer and cash on delivery are free rails that Sailo takes nothing from, which is the good news, and it also means Sailo cannot tell you a transfer landed. Only your bank app can do that. If you want the routine for checking properly, it's in how to know a bank transfer actually arrived.

Do this today

Write your four zones down with two numbers each, what you charge and what you pay. Then call the best rider you've used in the last month and agree those prices, the waiting-time rule and the failed-drop fee, in the chat, so it's in writing.

Publish the zones on your shop page before your next post goes out. Then look at your delivery fees against your rider payouts at the end of the month, the way Chidera did, because that single subtraction is the one that tells you whether any of this is working. If the wider maths of what a delivery should cost is still fuzzy, how to work out delivery charges does it band by band.