If you have ever run a small business in Nigeria, you know the routine. Product photos on WhatsApp. Prices shared one by one in DMs. Customers asking "how much" under every Instagram post. Payment sent to a personal account. Order tracked in a notebook or a voice note. It works, barely, but it does not scale.
That is the gap Payaza Africa is moving into. On Thursday June 18, the fintech is officially launching ShopAza in Lagos, a cloud-based ecommerce platform built to give African merchants a real digital storefront, inventory tracking, and payment collection in one place.
Why this matters
Africa's social commerce market, the buying and selling happening on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, is estimated to hit $33 billion in 2026, growing at roughly 13% a year. Millions of people have built real businesses on platforms never designed to be storefronts. The result is broken checkout flows, manual order tracking, payment disputes, and zero customer data.
ShopAza is launching across six markets from day one: Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, North America, and Europe. Multi-currency support is baked in, which matters for African merchants selling to diaspora customers. That alone could be a genuine differentiator.
The competition is already here
Payaza is not walking into an empty room. Paystack has Commerce. Flutterwave has Store. Interswitch has Quickteller Storefront. Bumpa, Sellevo, and Selar are already in the game. Every payment company with scale has tried to bolt an ecommerce layer onto its rails.
What gives Payaza a different angle is its wider ecosystem. ShopAza sits alongside ChatPay, Payaza Give, EventPorte, and Payaza Branches. The play seems to be a fully connected merchant experience rather than a standalone store builder. If they can wire chat selling, events, storefronts, and payments into one flow, that is a different product entirely.
The launch event will feature a keynote from Taiwo Adeeko, Payaza's Global Head of Operations, a live demo, and a panel on building scalable ecommerce businesses across Africa.
Africa's merchants deserve better infrastructure. ShopAza is the latest bet that someone can actually build it.
Pascal
1 Comments
Paystack Commerce already does cross-border payments. What exactly is new here?
Paystack Commerce is barebones. No serious inventory management. Limited customization. If ShopAza actually solves those gaps it is not the same product.