In Nigeria’s fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector, the real power brokers are wholesalers, distributors, and large-scale market traders. These informal traders move nearly 90% of consumer goods nationwide. However, most of the retail economy still struggles with sales records, inventory tracking, payment reconciliation, and market intelligence.
And for many FMCG manufacturers, the supply chain goes dark the moment goods leave the factory.
This gap is what Afiari, founded by Chigozie Njoku and George Ebisike, hopes to bridge. The founders describe the platform as a “digital documentation platform for retail trade.”
“Afiari is an ecosystem product. We provide the software to physical informal-type businesses that sell FMCG products, helping them automate everything from sales to inventory and even connecting them to sales applications for payments using a POS terminal,” Chigozie Njoku, Co-founder and CEO of Afiari, says.
Interestingly, Afiari did not begin as an infrastructure play.
In early 2022, the duo launched what was essentially a digital open market. The idea emerged simply from helping Njoku’s mother sell yams online. However, building the first version of Afiari exposed a truth that the founders couldn’t ignore: informal retailers didn’t just need e-commerce; they needed systems.
“They wanted to sell online, yes, but they also wanted to know why products were missing from their shops, which items were expired, how much they were actually making, and which customers owed them money,” Njoku tells Techpoint Africa.
As they explored the sector, the founders discovered an even bigger gap on the supply side: FMCG manufacturers had no visibility into product movement after distributors picked up goods. The lack of documentation across the value chain created blind spots for the trade chain.
In 2024, Njoku and his co-founder pivoted, dropping the marketplace-only model for a full-on retail operations and intelligence ecosystem designed specifically for informal trade.
What Afiari does and how it works
The name “Afiari” is derived from the Igbo word “Afia”, meaning a marketplace for food.
Ironically, the name came from the startup’s earliest iteration: a food market platform. The founders say they kept it because it represents something local, indigenous, and pan-African.
At its core, Afiari operates as a compound product with multiple tools working together to unify the informal retail supply chain.
The platform operates as a back-office app for informal retailers to handle supplier creation and purchase orders, purchase returns, inventory management, stock-level tracking, multi-price product entries, expense management and budgeting, warehouse-to-shop transfers, and analysis of top-performing products.
At the end of each business day, merchants automatically receive a WhatsApp report summarising revenue, profit, and sales performance; no dashboards required.
Afiari also functions as a Point of Sale (POS) app where physical sales are recorded.
Retailers can ring up customers, print receipts, track sales history, and sync every sale with inventory in real-time.
The retail app integrates with POS terminals from Interswitch to confirm card and transfer payments directly within the system.
Afiari’s initial service as an online marketplace remains in effect. Every product in a merchant’s inventory can also be sold online. Inventory is synced across physical and online sales, so retailers can not sell what they don’t have.
Afiari manages delivery through partners and charges an 8% transaction fee capped at ₦3,000 on customer purchases.
For enterprises, Afiari acts as a market intelligence platform. Manufacturers get real-time visibility into distributor and wholesaler stock, product performance insights, market share analysis, view retail trends, price sensitivity, and distribution patterns.
“This enables them to track how their products are moving in the market in real time,” Njoku says.
FMCGs can onboard their own network of sellers onto Afiari’s tools.
Since launching the new version of the product in 2024, Afiari has onboarded 33 businesses as paying merchants, acquired over 700 marketplace users, and completed a pilot with 7UP’s bottling operations, as well as becoming the digital distributors for Nigerian Breweries and Guinness.
The company has processed over $70,000 in POS-related transactions and has generated over $2,000 in revenue.
Afiari’s business model
Afiari runs a subscription model. Its annual subscription packages start at ₦60,000/year, while the company charges a one-time onboarding/training and stock-taking fee of ₦40,000.
For non-subscribers, Afiari charges 8% per transaction, capped at ₦3,000 for customers and 2% per transaction for businesses.
The annual subscription model of ₦60,000 per year gives Afiari a stable and predictable cash flow. For an operations-heavy platform managing inventory, logistics support, and vendor training, this stability helps with planning, scaling, and maintaining infrastructure.
However, for micro-retailers and informal market sellers who are Afiari’s target, this upfront cost can feel heavy, especially in Nigeria’s current inflationary environment.
This may limit adoption to only mid-tier businesses, slowing growth or forcing heavy marketing spend.
Competitive advantage and the future of Afiari
Instead of expecting merchants to figure things out on their own, Afiari deploys field agents to onboard, count stock, train staff, and provide ongoing support.
The founders claim that their deep understanding of sector-specific workflows is their competitive advantage.
Additionally, its offering of inventory, sales, payments, analytics, and FMCG intelligence, all in a connected platform, adds to that advantage. Most competitors offer one slice of the problem.
Afiari’s next phase is enterprise-focused as the team looks to expand its FMCG partnerships.
In the coming year, the company will focus on the roll out of its AI-driven intelligence for market analysis and its AI agents, which help FMCGs run simple operations entirely through WhatsApp.
Their ultimate goal now is to embed their apps directly on POS terminals, thereby eliminating the need for smartphones or laptops at these terminals.
While Afiari is currently operating in Lagos and Ibadan, the company plans to expand to more Nigerian cities and states.
