Nigerian startup BuyChat has rolled out its commerce-enabled chat app that connects traders with customers and allows for purchases to be made digitally.
Launched in beta in November and set for full launch next month, BuyChat is the result of an experiment called Balogun Market, based at the famous market on Lagos Island.
This pilot project validated the founding teams premise, that chat-commerce could work for traders in African city market clusters, and produced its roadmap for the launch of commerce-enabled messaging app BuyChat.
BuyChat allows users to discover, chat and haggle with traders in traditional markets in Lagos, pay for goods in-app and have them delivered to their homes. The app geolocates the user and makes it possible for the user to chat directly with merchants in his city markets while viewing inventory.
Users can also hail a taxi, book short stays in hotels and have food delivered.
“Really, we arrived the market with empathy for the small time traders in Balogun Market and how the big e-commerce traders in Nigeria at that time ignored them and left them behind,” founder Olayinka Oluwakuse told Disrupt Africa.
“We focused on the most basic level of communication that they used majorly and realised it was already their entry into the digital age.”
The startup secured angel investment as it was wrapping up the Balogun Market and making plans to build the BuyChat app, and is now in the process of wrapping up a seed round from a San Francisco-based venture capital (VC) fund.
Oluwakuse said uptake in the beta phase has been “very satisfactory”.
“What we are keen on for now regarding the user app is to use the initial use of the app to build updates that users would love,” he said. “From there we will be accelerating country to country.”
Though the startup is currently focused on Lagos Market with initial expansion plans on African cities, it has global ambitions. These stem from a productive but ultimately unsuccessful interview to take part in the Y Combinator accelerator in San Francisco.
“We were told what we were doing would work in any city in the world ,so why were we focusing just on building for Africa when we could build for the world?” Oluwakuse said.
That is now the startup’s goal, with BuyChat making revenues from a percentage cut on transactions between merchants and users. Oluwakuse also has plans to make use of the data the startup is collecting down the line.
“At first , we were disillusioned by the micro-level of the transactions on the app,but we realised the data was golden. The data we were generating was unprecedented in Nigeria,” he said.
“Nobody had earlier bothered about this space we were in, so if not for the insights we were initially getting, we would have given up.”
