The problem we started from
A seller with a following can take orders all day in direct messages. What they cannot do is tell you, on a Tuesday, what they have in stock, which customer ordered twice this month, or whether last week was better than the week before. The selling works. The business underneath it is invisible.
Every tool that fixes that was built for somewhere else. Prices in dollars, payment rails that will not settle to a Nigerian bank, address forms that demand a postcode, delivery pricing that assumes a national courier network. Each one is a small obstacle, and together they are the reason most sellers stay in the chat.
What we build
SellTrove is the layer underneath: a storefront, one catalogue, one stock count, orders from every channel in a single queue, payments through licensed Nigerian providers settling to the seller's own account, and a marketplace where products can be found by people who were not already following them.
We are a software company. We do not hold merchants' money, we do not deliver their parcels, and we do not sell their goods. Those things are done by people and companies licensed and equipped to do them, and our job is to connect the seller to them cleanly.
How we decide what to build
Two tests. Does it help a merchant make a sale or keep a customer? And is it true for the way business actually works here, rather than the way a product brief in another market assumed it worked?
The second one is why checkout collects a landmark, why bank transfers are reconciled by account number rather than narration text, and why product images are compressed hard before they ever reach a customer on mobile data.
Where this goes
Nigeria first, properly, before anywhere else. A platform that is excellent for Nigerian merchants is a far better foundation for the rest of the continent than one that is adequate everywhere.