Adlore Business Enterprise Limited has launched a live pilot of its conversational commerce platform, Jollof Boss, integrating the WhatsApp Cloud API with Paystack’s payment infrastructure to explore how African SMEs can manage product discovery, ordering and payments within messaging environments.
The pilot enables customers to browse a structured food catalogue inside WhatsApp, place orders through interactive chat flows and complete transactions using Paystack-generated payment links. Once payment is confirmed, automated notifications are sent to merchants, allowing them to process orders more efficiently.
Nigeria provides a particularly relevant environment for testing conversational commerce systems. The country combines high WhatsApp adoption, a rapidly expanding fintech ecosystem, and millions of mobile-first small businesses that already manage customer relationships through chat-based interactions. Through the Jollof Boss pilot, Adlore aims to observe how messaging platforms and payment systems can be orchestrated into a more seamless digital commerce workflow for African SMEs.
Across Nigeria, WhatsApp has increasingly become a practical digital storefront for many small businesses. Food vendors share menus through status updates, fashion retailers confirm orders in chat conversations, and payments are commonly completed through bank transfers or payment links sent during those conversations.
The Jollof Boss pilot was designed to test how these fragmented steps could be structured into a more coordinated conversational commerce workflow. Customers can select items from a menu, choose pickup or delivery options, receive a Paystack payment link, and trigger merchant notifications once payment has been confirmed.
Behind the scenes, the platform operates on an event-driven backend architecture that subscribes to WhatsApp webhooks, generates payment requests, and records timestamps across every stage of the order-to-payment lifecycle. This allows the system to measure how messaging and payment interactions unfold during real transactions.
During the pilot phase, ten real transactions were analysed five pickup orders and five delivery orders to understand how conversational commerce flows behave in Nigerian market conditions.
The observations showed that messaging infrastructure within WhatsApp performs efficiently. Message dispatch typically occurred within one to three seconds, while backend processing was generally completed within approximately fifteen seconds. Merchant notifications following payment confirmation were also nearly instantaneous.
However, the majority of total transaction time occurred during the payment stage. Pickup orders averaged around 132 seconds to complete, with roughly 79% of that time occurring during payment. Delivery orders averaged approximately 122 seconds, with payment accounting for about 40% of the overall workflow.
The payment links themselves were generated almost instantly. Most delays occurred after customers left the WhatsApp conversation to complete payments through external interfaces. Steps such as card entry, bank authentication, one-time password verification and network variability introduced additional time into the transaction process.
From these observations, the pilot highlighted an operational gap between messaging interactions and payment authorisation systems.
“WhatsApp is already the storefront for many African SMEs, but customers still have to walk out of the store to pay,” said Oghenero Inana, Business and Innovation Strategist at Adlore Business Enterprise Limited, the strategy and innovation firm behind the pilot.
“Our experiment shows that the infrastructure works. Messaging is fast and payments are reliable, but the coordination between the two systems remains fragmented.”
Beyond transaction timing, the pilot also revealed several structural challenges developers currently encounter when building conversational commerce systems.
For example, interactive WhatsApp product menus require developers to define product sections directly within application code. For businesses such as food vendors whose menus change frequently, this can introduce operational rigidity.
In addition, order payloads currently rely on internal product IDs rather than human-readable product names. This requires additional catalogue lookups before merchants can clearly view or confirm the items included in an order.
Delivery workflows presented another operational consideration. Within the pilot system, merchants entered delivery fees using formatted text messages that the backend parsed automatically. While functional, this method introduces additional system complexity and potential points of failure.
“These challenges are not failures of any single platform,” Inana added. “They simply reveal an orchestration gap between independently successful systems, messaging platforms and payment infrastructure.”
For developers, fintech providers, and technology platforms building tools for African SMEs, the pilot highlights an opportunity to improve coordination between messaging environments and payment authorisation processes.
According to the development team, addressing this orchestration gap could improve transaction continuity, reduce checkout friction and strengthen trust in automated commerce systems operating within messaging platforms.
The Jollof Boss pilot platform was engineered by Lead Developer Ikhiloya Imokhai, with operational coordination led by Esther Adeyemi.
The initiative forms part of a broader research and experimentation programme exploring how messaging platforms and fintech infrastructure can support digital commerce for African SMEs.
Readers can experience the conversational commerce workflow firsthand by interacting with the Jollof Boss WhatsApp catalogue.
The pilot is open to readers in Benin City and Lagos State, where real orders and payments can be completed directly through the WhatsApp interface. The experimental store will remain live as the team continues to observe real-world transaction behaviour and user interaction patterns.
Founders, developers, and fintech operators interested in conversational commerce infrastructure are encouraged to test the workflow directly. They can also download the complete report to get additional insights.
Access the WhatsApp catalogue here.
Download technical report here.
About Jollof Boss
Jollof Boss Services is a conversational commerce initiative developed by Adlore Business Enterprise Limited (A.B.E.L), a Nigerian strategy and innovation firm focused on helping organisations identify and leverage emerging opportunities across business and technology value chains.
Through projects such as the Jollof Boss conversational commerce pilot, A.B.E.L reveals how digital infrastructure and automation tools can disrupt e-commerce for African SMEs.
Adlore designs research pilots, product experiments, and strategic solutions that enable businesses to innovate their business model.
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Adlore Business Enterprise Limited
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