The first meeting about an online store in Nigeria often starts with the gateway. Paystack or Flutterwave. Sometimes Interswitch, sometimes a bank’s own monster. It is the wrong first meeting. A gateway cannot save a catalogue that has no weights, a delivery sentence that says “contact us”, or a checkout that asks for a life story on a phone in a danfo.
Product data is the store
Name, price, images that are not a WhatsApp screenshot, a description a buyer can use, variants that match what you can actually pack, and stock you will not sell twice. If that data lives in a notebook, the website will lie. Export it. Clean it. Then talk about themes.
Categories should match how people shop, not how the warehouse is arranged. Filters should reduce a list, not hide it. Search should find “asooke” when someone typed “aso oke”. That is not a payment problem.
Delivery, collection, returns
Lagos is not one zone. Abuja is not “FCT ₦2,000”. Spell out the cities you actually cover, the days, and what happens when the rider calls and nobody picks up. Offer collection if you have a counter. Returns need a sentence before the card is charged, not an argument after. If you do not accept returns, say it. Silence is how chargebacks start.
WhatsApp is support. It is a bad checkout. People will use it as checkout anyway if the cart is harder than a chat.
The WhatsApp temptation
A store that dumps every product enquiry into WhatsApp is not ecommerce. It is a catalogue with extra steps. Keep WhatsApp for the question that needs a human: “will this fabric match?”, “can you deliver to Gwagwalada on Saturday?”. Let the cart take the money for the thing that is already decided. Pre-fill the chat with the product name so they do not start from zero. There is a generator for that on this site for a reason.
Then the gateway
Paystack and Flutterwave both work. The criteria are boring: who you already have KYC with, which one your accountant can reconcile, whether the plugin is maintained, whether subscriptions or split payments matter. Test a ₦100 payment on the phone you actually own, on the network your customers use, not only on studio Wi-Fi. Watch the order email. Watch the inventory drop. Watch a failed payment that does not duplicate the order.
Analytics should see product views, add-to-cart, checkout start, purchase. If you cannot name those four, you cannot tell whether the new theme “converted better” or whether you had a lucky weekend.
What we ask before we connect anything
What you sell, how it is delivered, who handles questions, which payments you already take in the physical shop, and whether the catalogue is ready or still a Google Sheet with three spellings of the same SKU. That is enough to recommend a sensible WooCommerce setup. If you want that conversation, read how we build stores and send the brief by email or WhatsApp. Bring the sheet. We will not laugh at the third spelling. We will make you pick one.