My fiancee is into the clothing / accessories business and combines this with her daily job as a consultant. Her business recently experienced an increase in demand for certain products that she hardly gets enough sleep anymore. It hasn't been easy trying to balance her part-time job with her professional life.

After much deliberation, we decided she would need a shop and hire people to handle sales and delivery while she was at work.

Although we concluded that this was a good idea, we later discovered that this required much more than her capital and yearly profit combined. Even if she had to borrow from our monthly salaries, it would still take very long to break-even considering economic oddities.

It's quite expensive to own and run a shop in Nigeria today, not to mention other issues such as

- Finding a good location for your business
- Furnishing your shop (i.e. painting, interior decor, fans, ACs etc.)
- Building your customer base
- Expanding your business reach (e.g through adverts)
- Delivering goods to clients in other locations
- Providing flexible payment options
- Payment of electricity / water bills
- Hiring sales people

among others.

I'm no expert, but I believe these factors already make it difficult for those of us with very little capital to grow our businesses.

I tried to see if we could use Jumia, Konga or DealDey to showcase and sell her products, but their requirements and procedures were just too much. I wanted something simple to use that could easily get her noticed.

After much research, I stumbled across Shoppey (http://myshoppey.com) on Linda Ikeji's blog. They specialise in creating e-commerce solutions for SMEs and can help you setup your own customized online shop within a month for as low as N79,000.00.

This made me begin to rethink our business / investment options - owning an online shop may be cheaper and easier to manage.

Based on pricing information I gathered from the Shoppey website http://myshoppey.com/pricing, there are 3 packages you can choose from which readily provides free integration with Paga to allow your customers pay using their ATM cards. Plus you get your own website name with life-time hosting support.

But it doesn't end there...

With the Cash-On-Delivery option handled by their logistics team, we are able to vary our payment options and make it easy for our business as well as our customers to receive and make payments respectively.

What even makes this more exciting for us is that Shoppey handles all of the branding, advertising (via social media etc) and logistics needs of our business. We no longer have to worry about how to get our products across to customers. All of the heavy-lifting is handled by Shoppey without much involvement on our part.

According to a "friendly" female rep we spoke with, all Shoppey websites come with an admin dashboard which makes it easy to manage the products you upload to your website, customer orders, as well as performance statistics of your top selling products among others. Also, there's functionality to allow you send newsletters and email adverts from your admin dashboard. This way you can also run your own mini-ad campaign and provide updates to your customers. Here's a link to a tutorial on how to use the admin dashboard http://myshoppey.com/knowledge-base/

We requested a demo and were pleased with what we saw. Here's the link http://demo.myshoppey.com:8070/testPay/.

All I can say is that they are Godsend and have just made our lives easier. In fact, my fiancee says that someone had earlier advised her to have a website for her products but she didn't take it seriously up until now. However, I am glad that we are taking advantage of technology and the power of social media.

We have opted for the Platinum package which seems to have all we need, and are almost done with the registration process. We hope to get our online shop up and running in approximately 2 months from now.

So what did I learn?

Whether you are an existing or new business, you may actually be able to expand the reach of your business and grow your customer base by owning an online shop. Plus you eventually spend less and are able to focus your meager resources on growing your business.

I hope this information is valuable to somebody.

NOTE: I almost forgot. There's an ongoing mega slash offer of 50% for any Shoppey package you buy between now and 31st of September. Please grab the "awoof" while it lasts.