How Njoku creates seamless market for retailers with tech

For Chigozie Njoku, co-founder and CEO at Afiari, leveraging tech to create a new seamless market for retailers was a long-term desire.

Njoku was inspired to create a seamless retail market owing to his desire to change the narrative of his mum and other small traders who pass through severe stress operating sales manually.

He and George Ebisike, his co-founder and senior software engineer established Afiari to support businesses to sync their offline operations to online sales.

“We initially worked on enabling retail stores to sell their products online but not long into that, we discovered the need to fully build the infrastructure that will enable them to sync their offline operations to online sales.”

“This meant working on a full retail application to manage these businesses and giving them omni channels for sales,” he said.

The young entrepreneur explained that they have built the infrastructure to handle all the operations of retail businesses and build exactly what works for their businesses.

“We also plan to connect the solutions backward to the manufacturers of products so there is a straight line from manufacturing to point-of-sale or online sales allowing for product data to be shared across the whole supply chain.”

He explained that the retail sector is one of the sectors that have not seen significant technological progress, especially in Africa.

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According to him, the solutions that exist today are either legacy solutions built on old technology like Ethernet, meaning that they can’t scale beyond their physical location since data cannot be accessed once you leave the location or they do not have open APIs for connecting to online platforms whether self-managed or platform managed.

The entrepreneur said the idea to start Afari was also motivated by office tasks like purchasing, supplier’s payment and reconciliation, at MTN Nigeria Foundation where he started his career.

“I started out my career at MTN Nigeria Foundation, where I worked as an Administrator then later worked as a monitoring and evaluation officer as well as project support/coordinator. It was while I was handling tasks such as purchasing, payment resolution, vendor engagement, office administration, invoicing, and many more, that I got the idea to start,” he said.

The idea then, according to him, was to work with food vendors in the market to deliver items to customers due to the stress mum and I went through anytime we went to the market. In the course of our research, we also discovered that some people bought from stores and this led us to start with connecting people to the open market and stores in their locations.

However, he said the innovative solution Afari brought to the retail market will enable businesses to stay alive and also help them as a business to also grow.

”We are creating a new market so in a way, we are making it easy for more businesses to stay alive. If we do that, then that means we have to be alive. In a nutshell, we are learning more about the needs of the market and we are creating for that to stay ahead.”

Speaking on the company’s future outlook, he said the goal is to have the digital infrastructure to aid seamless data communication from the manufacturers to the retailers which will continue to take time.

“This is an ambitious goal and we can’t do all of that in one day. So, we are taking it one product at a time. We will be launching a new product for automated invoicing soon which will help businesses collect invoice payments automatically and this is for installments and one-off payments.

“So, businesses can now know all the customers who are yet to pay them, and what they have left, and allow their customers to pay via their invoice link so that all payments are tracked, and get paid into their accounts.”

He explained that this is a perfect time for digital transformation of offline businesses in Nigeria.