Pricing when your currency is unstable

You reordered your packaging and it cost more than the last two orders put together. Your prices haven't moved. Somewhere in between, your margin left the building, and you didn't notice because every individual sale still felt fine.

That's the whole problem, and it has four fixes.

Price off what it costs to replace the thing, not what you paid for it. Reprice on a fixed schedule rather than when you feel bad about a sale. Put an expiry on every quote longer than a day. And when your currency is falling faster than your bank pays interest, holding the right stock beats holding cash. A carton of jars that cost you GH₵420 in March and GH₵540 today isn't a 29% price rise you can absorb. It's a signal that your GH₵95 tub is priced off a number that no longer exists.

None of this is finance. It's four habits, and you can start all four this week.

The mistake is pricing off history

Almost every seller does this at the start, because it's what "cost plus margin" sounds like.

You bought 100 jars at ₦480 each. You add your ingredients, your time and a margin, and you land on ₦4,500 a jar. You sell them. Every sale is profitable against the ₦480 you paid.

Then you reorder and the jars are ₦620. Now the same ₦4,500 price makes less than it did, and the gap has been widening quietly across every sale you made in between. You didn't lose money on any single transaction. You lost the ability to buy back what you sold, which is worse, because it doesn't show up until the day you need to restock and the number in your account isn't enough.

Replacement cost pricing fixes it in one sentence. Price against what it will cost you to make the next one, not the last one.

That means you need a current number for your main inputs. Not an accurate one to the naira, a current one. Message your supplier once a fortnight and ask what a carton costs today. Most sellers don't, and then get surprised by their own supply chain.

Reprice on a day, not on a feeling

This is the single most useful habit in this article and the one sellers resist hardest.

Pick a day. First Monday of the month, or every second Monday if things are moving fast. On that day you check your three or four main input costs, recalculate your floor on your best sellers, and either change the price or explicitly decide not to. Fifteen minutes.

The reason to fix the day is not tidiness. It's that repricing on a feeling produces a price list nobody can explain, including you. You put something up because a customer annoyed you, forget to put something else up for eight months, and end up with two products in the same range at prices that make no sense next to each other. Buyers notice that. Sellers who reprice when they feel bad about a sale end up unable to answer the question "why is this one more?"

Between scheduled reviews, use a trigger. If a main input moves more than a threshold you set, say 10%, you reprice immediately rather than waiting. Everything smaller waits for the day.

Write the date on the page. "Prices as of August 2026" gives you permission to change without an argument, and buyers accept a dated price changing far more readily than one that appears to have moved because they asked. The wider question of raising prices without losing customers is in when to raise your prices.

Quotes need an expiry

Any price you give outside your published list is a quote, and a quote without a date is a promise you didn't mean to make.

"₦180,000 for the set of six. This price holds until Friday 14th."

That's a normal, professional sentence. Nobody is offended by it. Wholesale buyers expect it. And it saves you from the conversation where someone comes back five weeks later, screenshot in hand, wanting a price you built from costs that have since moved 20%.

Set the window to match your actual exposure. If your inputs are local and stable, a month is fine. If you're buying anything imported in a fast-moving month, seven days is honest and not unreasonable. Say why if you like, once: "I hold quotes for a week because my packaging is imported."

The custom-order trap is the expensive version of this. Someone commissions a piece in March for delivery in May, you agree a price on day one, and by the time you're buying materials in April the price you agreed doesn't cover them. Two ways out. Either quote with a materials clause, stating that the balance is calculated at dispatch on material costs at that date, or take a deposit that actually covers the materials and buy them immediately.

Buy them immediately is almost always the better answer. It's simpler, the buyer understands it, and it converts a currency risk into a shelf of stock. Taking a deposit before you start covers how to ask for it without sounding like you distrust them.

Stock as a hedge, and where that goes wrong

In a market where your currency loses value faster than your savings account pays, inventory you can definitely sell is worth more than cash you're definitely holding.

That's a real strategy and small sellers in Lagos, Kumasi, Karachi and Buenos Aires have run it forever. Buy the packaging for six months when you see a good price. Buy the fabric before the season. Convert money that's shrinking into goods that aren't.

It also goes wrong in four specific ways, and they're worth naming because the strategy sounds cleverer than it sometimes is.

What goes wrong	Who it hits
It perishes	Food, cosmetics with short shelf life, anything with an expiry date
It goes out of fashion	Clothing, phone accessories, anything trend-led
It locks up your working capital	Anyone who then can't take a large order because the money is on a shelf
It gets damaged or stolen	Anyone without dry, secure, insured storage, which is most people

The rule that holds up: hedge with inputs, not with finished trend goods. Jars, bottles, labels, boxes, base oils and plain fabric hold their usefulness. Sixty units of a specific sneaker colourway do not. The first is a hedge. The second is a bet.

And leave yourself liquid enough to buy an opportunity. The seller who put everything into packaging and then couldn't take a 200-unit corporate order has hedged themselves out of the best month they'd have had.

Should you price in dollars?

Sometimes, and less often than people think.

It genuinely works for digital goods sold to buyers abroad, for a diaspora customer base who earn in a hard currency anyway, and for wholesale to buyers who import. In those cases the buyer is not converting anything in their head, so a dollar price is just a price.

It works badly when your customers earn locally. A local buyer seeing a dollar price does the conversion themselves, at whatever rate they saw that morning, and concludes that you're either gouging or hedging at their expense. It reads as distrust of your own currency, which is not a great feeling to hand someone at the moment they're deciding to buy from you.

The middle path most sellers land on: publish local prices, review them on your fixed day, and hold a separate hard-currency price list for export and wholesale that you built from the ground up rather than converted. Chinelo in Enugu sells beaded bags at ₦28,000 locally and quotes £46 including shipping for UK orders, and the second number is not the first number run through a converter. It's her cost, her time, real international freight and a margin she'd accept in pounds. That's why it doesn't need to change every time the rate does.

If you want a real exchange rate rather than a headline one, get it from your own bank or your central bank. The Central Bank of Nigeria and the Bank of Ghana both publish official rates, and your actual buying rate will differ from both. I'm not printing any rate in this article, because a number written in August 2026 could be badly wrong by the time you read it, and using a stale rate is how sellers set prices that lose money for a month before anyone notices.

Worked example: Abena, shea body cream, Kumasi

Abena makes shea body cream in Kumasi. GH₵95 for a 250ml tub, roughly 110 tubs a month, sold through Instagram and WhatsApp with a few salon accounts buying six at a time.

Her cost structure at the start: shea butter and oils bought locally, tubs and pumps imported, labels printed in Accra. Roughly GH₵38 a tub in materials, GH₵12 in her time at a rate she'd accept, so about GH₵45 of margin on GH₵95.

Then the tubs went from GH₵420 a carton of 100 to GH₵540 over about five months. That's GH₵1.20 more per unit. Small. Except the oils moved too, and the labels, and none of it individually looked like a reason to change a price.

By the time she checked, her materials were GH₵49 a tub, not GH₵38. Her GH₵45 margin was GH₵34. She'd sold roughly 400 tubs across that stretch and given away around GH₵4,400 without a single transaction feeling wrong.

What she does now:

• First Monday of every month, she messages her tub supplier and her oil supplier and writes down today's price. Ten minutes.
• She recalculates the floor on her two best sellers on the same day.
• She holds quotes for salons for 14 days, stated in writing.
• She keeps three months of tubs and labels in a dry cupboard, bought when she sees a good carton price, and she does not stockpile finished cream because it has a shelf life.
• Her price page says "prices as of" with a month on it.

She raised the tub to GH₵110 in one move rather than three, explained it once on her page in two sentences, and lost two customers out of about seventy regulars. That's the part sellers dread and it's usually smaller than the fear.

The honest limit, and it's a specific one

Repricing on a manual rail has a gap in it that a card checkout doesn't.

On a card payment, the price is locked at the moment the buyer pays. Money moves, order closes, done. On bank transfer and cash on delivery, the price is a number sitting in a message. If your buyer agrees GH₵95 on Tuesday, you reprice on Wednesday, and they transfer GH₵95 on Friday, you either eat the difference or have an awkward conversation you'll usually lose.

The fix is procedural, not technical. Anything you've quoted, you honour for the window you stated, and you state a window. Anything you haven't quoted moves with the page.

And in Nigeria and Ghana specifically, the card rail isn't the escape hatch. Sailo's card payments run on Stripe and only Stripe, and on Stripe's own global availability page read in August 2026, Nigeria and Ghana both sit in an extended network served by Paystack rather than as launched Stripe countries. Sailo doesn't support Paystack. So the Business plan at $49 a month won't buy you a locked-in-at-payment price button in either market. You're running manual rails, which means quoting windows and repricing discipline are doing the job that a checkout does elsewhere.

Sailo also can't tell you a transfer arrived, in any currency, at any speed. The order sits at pending until you mark it paid, and you mark it paid by looking at your own account. That's the permanent trade for a manual rail, which takes no commission at all.

What to do next

This week, do three small things.

Message your two main suppliers and ask what your key input costs today. Write the number and the date in a note on your phone. That note is now the most valuable document in your business.

Recalculate the floor on your single best-selling product using that number, not the one from last time. If your margin has moved by more than 10%, change the price now rather than at the next review, and put a date on the price list when you do.

Then put an expiry line into whatever you send when you quote. One sentence, saved as a reply, used every time.

If the reason your prices keep getting tested is that your buyers negotiate as a matter of course, that's a different skill and it's in how to handle price negotiation without losing the sale. And if you're building the Ghanaian side of this from scratch, how to sell online in Ghana covers the rails, the delivery and the confirmation habit that stops fake alerts costing you stock.