For many small businesses in Nigeria, being online still means having a catalogue of pictures on WhatsApp Business and receiving orders via Instagram DMs. There’s no cart, no checkout, and customers often have to ask for prices, which can create friction in the sales cycle.
That gap between having a product to sell and having an actual digital storefront to sell it from is what Payaza Africa is stepping into on Thursday, June 18, 2026, with the official launch of ShopAza, a cloud-based e-commerce platform. The company is positioning it as an all-in-one alternative for merchants who want a branded online store, inventory tracking, and payment collection without having to stitch together five different tools.
The launch will take place in Lagos, Nigeria. It will feature a keynote address by Taiwo Adeeko, Payaza’s Global Head of Operations, a live platform demonstration, and a panel discussion on building scalable e-commerce businesses across Africa.
Africa’s eCommerce opportunity
The buying and selling that takes place via WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook rather than official websites is estimated to reach $33 billion in 2026, growing at roughly 13% a year, according to a recent market intelligence report. Millions of people have built informal businesses on platforms that were never designed to be storefronts. As a result, these businesses face similar growth barriers, including a distorted checkout flow, manual order tracking, payment disputes, and poor customer data management.
This is the problem a growing list of products has tried to solve. Paystack has Commerce, Flutterwave has Store, and Interswitch’s Quickteller has Storefront, each of these attached to an existing payment gateway. Dedicated players like Bumpa, Sellevo, and Selar also exist. Many businesses that use digital storefronts point to a few consistent gaps that persist, including limited branding and customisation, difficulty managing inventory and limited customer retention tools.
Payaza is the latest fintech entering the space to solve these issues, having successfully operated in Africa’s payments ecosystem.
Payment processing has become a thin-margin business, and merchants typically switch solutions based on fees and uptime. With the eCommerce offering, payment companies have more visibility on what moves through their rails and a natural entry point to sell other products in lending and analytics.
Payaza is a pan-African payments infrastructure company that has built out operations across 21 countries, serving everyone from traditional merchants to immigrant-owned businesses. ShopAza isn’t a standalone bet either; it sits within a wider Payaza ecosystem alongside ChatPay, Payaza Give, EventPorte, and Payaza Branches, suggesting the company may eventually try to wire chat-based selling, events, and storefronts into one connected merchant experience rather than leaving ShopAza to compete alone.
ShopAza, set to launch in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, alongside North America and Europe, from day one, will support merchants across several business environments and varied currencies. Multi-currency support matters as African merchants acquire customers in the diaspora, and if ShopAza’s payment rails genuinely make that easier than the alternatives, that’s a real differentiator.
