In most places, online shopping still works the same way it did 20 years ago: add to cart, go to checkout, pay. But in Africa, especially in places like Tanzania and Kenya, things work differently. People don’t check out on websites. They chat.
At Ghala, a platform built for WhatsApp commerce, we started noticing something interesting. Many sellers didn’t care about having a fancy online shop. What they really needed was an easy way to collect payments during a conversation. That’s when we realized: the future of shopping isn’t a page. It’s a message.
1. Why People Shop Through Conversations
In Africa, most small business owners sell on WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook. A customer might see a post, send a message, ask a few questions, and then decide to buy. It’s quick, human, and flexible.
Over 70% of informal sellers in East Africa don’t use a traditional online store at all. Instead, they complete sales through chat. That’s where the trust is. That’s where the real business happens.
2. The Problem with Traditional Checkouts
Most online checkout systems assume you have:
- Good internet
- A laptop or smartphone with lots of data
- A customer willing to enter card details
But most African shoppers use low-cost smartphones and prefer mobile money. They also like to talk to the seller first.
So when you send them to a complicated checkout page, you lose them.
3. How Ghala Is Changing Things
Ghala started as a simple storefront for WhatsApp. But soon, we saw merchants using it differently. Many weren’t uploading full product catalogs. They just wanted to send a "Pay Now" link in a chat.
We built features to support this:
- Payment orchestration across M-Pesa, Selcom, Paystack, and others
- Real-time payment tracking so merchants know who paid
- Fallbacks (coming soon): if one payment method fails, we auto-switch to another
We’re becoming a smart checkout system inside the conversation built for how people really buy.
4. The Future of Checkout in Africa
Shopping here is social. It happens in voice notes, chats, and comments. The next big wave isn’t more e-commerce websites. It’s smart tools that let you:
- Send a payment link during a chat
- Retry failed payments automatically
- Use any PSP without needing 5 different apps
That’s what we’re building at Ghala.
Conclusion: The Conversation Is the Checkout
Our merchants taught us something big: they don’t need a shop. They need a way to get paid that fits into their daily flow. That flow is a conversation.
Forget the cart. Forget the checkout page. If you're building for Africa, build for chat.
That’s where commerce lives now.