As more commerce shifts online, African SMBs still have limited options to turn to for setting up and running their own professional online stores. The available options require heavy reliance on developers for initial setup and continuous maintenance, expensive to manage with payments in USD, complex to use and often with little to no local support.
Existing lite-weight solutions like online catalogues and one page stores are great for micro businesses but too simplistic, lacking brand customisation, integrations and advanced features needed by high potential SMBs to drive sustained growth.
To address this gap, Seller was launched in 2020, as an eCommerce platform that helps small businesses set up and manage their own professional online stores without any technical expertise. Since then we’ve had hundreds of businesses set up an online shop with Seller and sell to customers online. However the experience was sub par, so in early 2021 we went back into stealth mode.
Today, it’s exciting to announce the launch of Seller 2.0.
Seller 2.0 is a delightful, easy to use, yet powerful eCommerce platform built for African small businesses. Seller will empower African entrepreneurs to own their brand, find new customers, sell at scale, and grow their business to a global audience.
Here’s what’s new with Seller 2.0 –
- A Back-office that Sparks Joy — The Back-office, which is the main control center for Seller store owners, has been completely redesigned for simplicity and efficiency. We’ve made it easier to manage all the aspects of your store right from your mobile phone or PC alike. We streamlined the product upload process and order management flow. We also revamped the storefront customiser making it easier for anyone to design or make changes to their storefront and see it in real time. No more calling and waiting days and weeks for a developer to make the smallest changes on your storefront.
- Better Way to Manage Products and Inventory — We’ve introduced new product and inventory management features like; Simplified inventory page, product categories to make it easier to manage all your inventory items, and collections to group them on the storefront for easier promotion by merchants and discovery by customers.
- Payments & Shipping Simplified — The two most popular payment gateways in Nigeria are integrated out of the box. So merchants can collect payments via their Paystack or Flutterwave account by simply adding their keys into their store back office. For shipping, merchants can set their shipping options, rates per location and delivery time and this will be instantly updated on the storefront.
- Taking the Hassle out of Online Marketing and Operations — Marketing and promotions are critical to the success of an online store, as well as constantly refreshing your inventory, content, and promptly responding to orders. However business owners don’t always have the bandwidth for all of this. We’ve set up a team to assist Seller store owners with online marketing across Facebook, Google and other platforms, as well as the operations of refreshing their inventory, content, store front and orders.
Merchants can now signup and login with Google or Facebook, request setup and design support from the Seller team at no extra charge, access free storefront themes available right away with much more coming soon. Seller is offering 14 days free trial after and a monthly subscription with no commission on sales.
Seller is really about helping African entrepreneurs and small businesses find efficiency and scale. Seller wants to help you stay on top of your business, sell more efficiently and reach a global audience.
With its new architecture, Seller will make improvements, integrate 3rd party solutions and release more features more often as it continues to learn more about what business owners need to scale their businesses. Seller will also be available in other African countries in a few months.
To partner, learn more or signup, please visit seller.africa or send an email to support@seller.africa