It is easy to talk about "the African market" as if it were one thing. It is not. Even inside one city, a customer can buy from a shop with a website in the morning and from a stall with a WhatsApp number in the afternoon, paying by card once and by transfer the next time.
Formal and informal, side by side
Formal businesses have registered companies, accounts, websites and staff. Informal businesses run on relationships, phone numbers, cash, transfers and memory. In practice the two are deeply connected. Formal distributors supply informal traders. Informal sellers reach customers that formal brands never see. A single product can pass through both before it reaches someone's home.
Much software is designed only for the formal side. It assumes a desk, a laptop, a steady connection, an accounts department and a customer with a card. When those assumptions are missing, the software simply does not get used.
What changes when you design for both
- Phones first. Many traders run their whole business from one phone, so tools must be light, fast and simple on a small screen.
- Familiar channels. Orders, questions and receipts already move through chat. Good tools work with that instead of against it.
- Local payments. Bank transfers and local methods need to be confirmed automatically, so nobody has to check screenshots by hand.
- Patchy connections. Records should be captured offline and synced when the network returns.
- Trust. In relationship-driven markets, a tool must make the seller look more reliable to their customers, not more distant.
Different cities, different markets
Africa is also not one market across borders, or even across a single country. Payment habits, languages, regulations, climate and buying patterns change from place to place. Technology that works in one city can need real adjustment in the next. That is why we start with the people doing the work, not with a template.
The question is not whether a market is formal or informal. It is whether the technology fits how that market actually works.
Where we are starting
Our own platform, VisuAfric, sells to buyers in Africa and abroad, which taught us early that one checkout and one set of assumptions are not enough. Our work on WhatsApp-based services comes from the same lesson. We are now exploring simple tools for informal traders, built on what we have learned so far.
