How to start an online business in Nigeria

You already have the customers. What you don't have is a way for them to see the price without asking, pay you without a conversation, and get the thing without three days of "has it shipped?"

Start there, not with a website.

An online business in Nigeria needs four things: a page people can see with prices on it, an account people can transfer to, a dispatch plan, and a rule for confirming money before stock leaves your house. Nothing on that list costs anything. A bank transfer over NIP lands in seconds, costs the buyer almost nothing, needs no gateway and no merchant application, and it's already what your buyers use to pay everyone else. If you sell a ₦4,500 jar of shea butter, a transfer keeps every naira of it. That is a better deal than any processor will ever offer you.

The part that costs you is confirming it. We'll get to that, because it's where sellers actually lose money.

Instagram is the shop window, WhatsApp is the counter

Most Nigerian small businesses run on this pattern whether or not anyone decided it. You post on Instagram. People comment. You move them to WhatsApp. You negotiate, agree, they transfer, you dispatch.

It works. It's also where the leak is. Every one of those steps needs you to be awake and typing, and the answer to most of the questions is a price you've typed 200 times.

The fix isn't to abandon the pattern, because the pattern is the market. It's to put the boring half on a page. Prices, sizes, delivery areas, delivery days, how you take payment. Then your DM time goes on the questions that actually need you: "can you do it in a bigger jar", "is it good for eczema", "my sister is in Ibadan can she collect".

That page can be a link in your bio, and it should be a page a buyer can read on a phone with two bars of signal in a bus. If your link goes to a menu of other links, you've added a tap for no reason and every tap loses buyers.

Bank transfer, and the way it actually goes wrong

Transfers in Nigeria are instant. That matters more than it sounds, because it removes an excuse. In markets where transfers take a day, "it hasn't reflected yet" is often true. In Nigeria it is almost never true. If a buyer sent it, it's there, and if it isn't there, they didn't send it or they sent it somewhere else.

So the whole game is confirming.

One failure costs Nigerian sellers more stock than any other, and it isn't hypothetical. Fake credit alerts. A buyer, or someone pretending to be one, sends you an SMS or a screenshot that looks exactly like your bank's alert, complete with the right sender ID and a balance that adds up. You're busy, the rider is waiting, the alert looks right, you dispatch. The money was never sent.

The rule that ends this, and it costs you eleven seconds:

Never ship on an alert. Ship on a balance. Open your banking app, look at the actual balance, find the actual credit. An SMS is a text message and text messages can say anything.

Second rule: never accept a screenshot as proof of a transfer, for the same reason. A screenshot proves a screen existed. Scheduled transfers show a success screen too, and they land whenever the buyer told them to.

Third: give every order a reference and ask for it back. Your app will show you TRF FRM ADEBAYO O and ₦18,000, and you'll have four ₦18,000 orders that week. Without a reference you're guessing. The full method, including what to do about partial payments and the buyer who paid into your old account, is in how to know a bank transfer actually arrived.

Worked example: Chidinma, whipped shea butter, Lagos

Chidinma makes whipped shea butter in Surulere. ₦4,500 for a 250ml jar, ₦7,800 for 500ml. About 60 to 80 jars a month, mostly to Lagos, with maybe eight orders a month going to Abuja and Port Harcourt.

Her setup:

• One bio link to a page with both sizes, both prices, the ingredients, and a line saying "Lagos mainland ₦1,500, island ₦2,500, other states by courier ₦3,500 to ₦5,000".
• Payment: bank transfer only. Account details on the page, plus a note: "use your order number as the narration".
• Dispatch: a rider she's used for a year for Lagos, a courier for everything else.
• Confirmation: she checks the app, not the alert, and she marks the order paid before she tells the rider anything.

A normal month for her is roughly ₦360,000 of goods. Her total cost of taking payment is ₦0, because no processor is involved. Her total cost of confirming payment is about ten minutes a day, which is the real price and nobody puts it on a pricing page.

The mistake she made in month three: she started offering "pay on delivery" for Lagos because a customer asked, and didn't set a rule for it. Within six weeks she'd had four riders come back with unsold jars because the buyer wasn't picking up, and one rider she had to pay twice. She now offers pay-on-delivery only to buyers who've ordered before, and takes ₦2,000 upfront from everyone else. Refusals went to nearly zero. The ₦2,000 isn't really a deposit; it's a filter.

Delivery, riders, and the money that quietly disappears

Two systems, and they fail differently.

Dispatch riders, intra-city. Fast, cheap, personal, and entirely dependent on one person's phone being on. The failure is cash. If the rider collects on your behalf you now have a reconciliation problem: which of today's six deliveries did he collect for, how much, and when is he giving it to you. Settle daily. Write it down at handover, in front of him, both of you looking at the same number, order by order. Not that evening from memory, because your memory will confidently invent a figure and it will be wrong in his favour.

Courier, interstate. Slower, priced on weight and destination, and the volumetric weight thing will catch you once. A big light box of jars costs more to send than a small heavy one, because you're charged on the space it occupies in the van.

For interstate, get the money before the parcel moves. A refused parcel in Kano when you're in Lagos costs you the freight twice and you may not get the goods back in sellable condition. Prepaid interstate, flexible in your own city, is the split most sellers converge on.

If you're mostly delivering inside one city and paying too much to do it, delivering locally without a courier covers the alternatives.

Pricing when the naira moves

If any of your cost is imported, your price has a shelf life. Packaging, oils, hardware, anything that came through a port. Two habits protect you.

Price against your replacement cost, not what you paid. If a carton of jars cost you ₦48,000 in March and costs ₦61,000 today, your ₦4,500 jar is being priced off a number that no longer exists. You'll feel fine right up until you reorder.

And put a date on your price list. "Prices as of August 2026" on the page gives you permission to change it without an argument. Buyers accept a dated price changing. They don't accept feeling tricked.

Anything you sell to customers abroad, price in the currency you'll actually be paid in and decide who eats the conversion. Selling in a currency that moves goes deeper on this than I can here.

Registering the business

The obligations exist in two separate shapes and people confuse them.

There's registering the business name or company, which is what gets you a corporate bank account, a name nobody else can use, and the ability to be taken seriously by suppliers and landlords. And there's tax, which applies to your income whether or not you've registered anything.

Registration in Nigeria goes through the Corporate Affairs Commission and you can start it online. I'm not printing the current fees or turnover thresholds here, because they move and a stale number in an article could cost you money. Check cac.gov.ng for what registration currently costs and firs.gov.ng for what you currently owe, or pay an accountant for an hour before you assume you're below a line.

What you can do today, with no registration at all: keep every order in one place with a date, an amount and a buyer, and stop paying for stock out of the same account you use for groceries. Open a second account in your own name if you have to. It costs nothing, it takes an afternoon, and whatever you register as later, that separation is the thing you'll wish you'd started sooner.

Looking like a real seller

Nigerian buyers have been burned and they're checking. The signals that work are unglamorous:

• A real account name that matches the business name they think they're paying. A mismatch is the single most common reason a buyer stops mid-transfer.
• Delivery areas and days written down, not negotiated per order.
• Photos of the actual thing, in your actual hand, not a stock image from Alibaba. Nigerian buyers reverse-image-search more than sellers think.
• A price on the page. A shop that won't show a price reads as a shop that prices by how rich you look.
• Answering "how much" with a number, immediately, even when the answer is "₦4,500, ₦6,000 delivered to your area".

Proving you are a real seller has the full checklist. It's worth an hour of your time before you spend anything on ads.

Where Sailo fits, and where it doesn't

Sailo gives you the page. sailo.store/yourname, live at signup, with your products, options and prices on it, and an order button that opens WhatsApp with the item, the options, the address and the total already written out. Bank transfer takes bank name, account name, account number, IBAN, SWIFT or BIC and a free-text instructions box, so you can spell out exactly what narration you want. Cash on delivery is a free-text notes field. Sailo takes nothing at all on bank transfer, cash on delivery or chat orders, because on those it never touches the money.

Two honest limits, and the first one matters more in Nigeria than almost anywhere.

Card payments probably aren't available to you. Sailo's card rail runs on Stripe and only Stripe. Stripe's own global availability page in August 2026 listed Nigeria under "extended network" pointing at Paystack rather than as a launched Stripe country, and Sailo doesn't support Paystack, whatever you may have read elsewhere. So upgrading won't produce a card button. Build on the rails you can actually run, which for you means transfer and cash, and those are the rails your buyers prefer anyway.

Sailo can't tell you the money arrived. The order sits at pending until you mark it paid. There's no integration with your bank and there isn't going to be one, because Sailo never touches the money. That ten minutes a day of checking is yours. It's what a rail Sailo takes nothing on actually costs you.

The free plan is $0 and caps at 10 products, which for Chidinma's two sizes is not a constraint and for someone selling 60 SKUs of hair bundles absolutely is.

What to do next

Tonight, do three things.

Write your delivery zones and prices as a list, with real numbers, and put them somewhere a buyer can read without messaging you. Second, put your account name, number and bank on the same page, with the exact narration you want, and check that the account name reads as the business a buyer thinks they're paying. Third, add one line to your own head and don't break it: nothing leaves the house until the balance in the app has changed.

Then take the ten most recent DMs where someone asked a question and didn't buy, and answer every one of those questions on the page instead.

If you want the wider comparison of every rail before you commit, how to take payment as a small seller lays out what each one costs and what it leaves on your desk afterwards.