Bizthom opens public beta: commerce software that helps African merchants sell more

Ask any Nigerian who sells online how a typical sale goes, and you'll hear some version of the same story. A customer sees your product on Instagram and sends a DM: "How much?" You reply with the price and a few more photos. They go quiet.

Two days later, they're back asking if you can do something on the price. You agree, send your account number, and wait. Nothing. Three weeks later, a message lands: "Oga, is it still available?"

Multiply that by every customer, every day, and you have the reality of selling online here. The demand is real and the traffic is real, but most of it never turns into money.

Where we're coming from

Bizthom started as a school. Our founder, Joel Amawhe, had been teaching Nigerian business owners to sell since 2020, and in 2024 his programmes moved under the Bizthom name: SWOF, on finding bulk buyers, and EVAA, on writing ads that make people feel something. Across those five years, more than 13,000 business owners went through them, and SWOF students alone have reported an estimated ₦20 billion in sales.

That number should feel like a win. Instead, it exposed a gap we couldn't ignore. Students would learn the strategies, get fired up, then go back to their shops and struggle. Not because they weren't capable, but because their tools were working against them.

Most of those tools were built for shoppers in San Francisco or London, not for a market where people want to negotiate, trust word of mouth over a nice-looking website, and would rather talk on WhatsApp than open an email. As Joel put it in a recent dispatch, you can't run a Ferrari engine inside a Keke Napep.

The platforms built for Nigerian sellers mostly focus on operations: inventory, order tracking, payments. Those matter, and Bizthom handles them too. But none of them answers the question that decides whether a small business survives: how do you get a stubborn customer to actually press pay?

So in October 2025, we made a call. The courses went back to where they started, under Joel's own name at joelamawhe.com, where existing students still have full access. Bizthom became a technology company with one job: building the tools those students had been missing. We started building in December.

So what is Bizthom?

Simply put, Bizthom is a commerce platform that turns more of your conversations into sales. It gives sellers a website built around how Nigerians buy, an AI sales agent that negotiates with their customers and follows up when they go quiet, and the inbox, broadcasts and automations to bring buyers back, all from one dashboard.

Today, Bizthom helps sellers do four things.

1. Turn visitors into buyers

Shoppers on a Bizthom store see what people near them are buying, recent activity from real buyers, and how much stock is left, so they know others trust you before they've decided to. Offer countdowns and a bag timer give them a reason to buy now rather than later, and reviews with photos, video and voice notes do the convincing a product photo can't.

When they're ready, checkout opens right on the page in three short steps, so they never leave your store to pay. It asks for a phone number before an email, because your customers answer WhatsApp and SMS far more often than they check their inbox, and they can pay by card, by bank transfer or on delivery.

2. Close the sale in conversation

Ejiro, our AI sales agent, answers customers on your store and on WhatsApp. When a customer wants to price, Ejiro negotiates within the minimum you set, and it hands the chat to you whenever a human touch is needed.

When someone leaves without paying, Ejiro follows up by SMS and WhatsApp, so "I'll come back" gets a second chance instead of being forgotten.

3. Run the business behind the sale

One dashboard brings together your WhatsApp inbox, an orders board for online, manual, offline and imported orders, contacts and smart groups, broadcasts by WhatsApp, SMS and email, automations, team roles, your own domain, a store designer, insights and refunds. Payments land in a wallet you can withdraw from.

Ejiro works for you here too: it reads your numbers, writes product descriptions and ad scripts, and tells you what to fix.

4. Sell in bulk

For sellers who work with distributors, Bizthom manages the network and routes each order to the right distributor based on where the customer is, with wholesale pricing for your bulk buyers.

Every plan includes your website, Ejiro and the dashboard. See the plans on our pricing page.

From private beta to public beta

On 31 December, we brought a small group of our students into a WhatsApp group, showed them the earliest version of Bizthom on a New Year's Eve call, and had them set up their stores the next morning. They sold on it, broke it, and reported every bug so we could fix it fast. By January, merchants were already selling more with it.

Today, we're opening Bizthom to everyone in public beta. Anyone selling online can sign up at bizthom.com, set up a store and start selling.

We're calling it a beta because we're still building fast, and some things will break along the way. When they do, tell us through live chat on Bizthom or at support@bizthom.com. The merchants who build with us now will shape what Bizthom becomes.

Where we see Bizthom in a few months

This is only the start. In the coming months, we want Bizthom to follow sellers wherever they make money, not just on their website.

Every conversation in one place. Instagram and Facebook messages will join WhatsApp in the Bizthom inbox, so the customer who asks "how much?" in your DMs gets the same quick answer and the same follow-up as one who visits your store.

Your customers selling for you. Nigerians buy from people they trust, and nobody is more trusted than a happy customer. We're building referrals so your buyers can bring their friends, and so merchants who love Bizthom can bring other sellers along.

Selling in person. Many of our merchants also sell from a shop or a market stall. We want those sales to run through Bizthom too, with the same stock, customers and records as everything you sell online.

An Ejiro that feels like part of your team. Every conversation teaches Ejiro more about how your customers buy, what makes them hesitate and what finally gets them to pay, and we want it to get sharper at closing with every sale. We also want you to be able to give it your own name, so your customers are chatting with your store's sales agent, not ours.

We're starting in Nigeria because it's the market we know best, but the problem isn't only Nigerian. Across Africa, sellers are fighting the same battle with the wrong tools, and we're building Bizthom for all of them.

See it live tonight

Tonight at 7 p.m., our founder Joel Amawhe is hosting a live session for our community: How to make Nigerians not go scot-free unless they buy from you. He'll walk through Bizthom and review a few businesses live. Read the invitation, and find the meeting link on the Bizthom WhatsApp Channel.

Welcome in.

The Bizthom Team