Scaling an E-commerce Business Beyond WhatsApp
LadyF AI
Scaling an E-commerce Business Beyond WhatsApp
Afrikstabel sold African prints to customers around the world, but much of the business still ran manually through WhatsApp and social media.
That worked at a smaller scale. It wouldn't work as order volume, products and customers grew.
The challenge wasn't simply to design an e-commerce app. It was to design a system that could take work off the business as it scaled.
What needed to change
Instead of that giant What I Delivered shopping list:
I designed the customer and operational experience together:
→ Mobile shopping experience
→ Responsive web experience
→ Admin system for managing orders
→ Redesigned website
The goal was to move repetitive work out of WhatsApp and into the product wherever it made sense.
The interesting decisions I had to make
1. Reducing friction during verification
The verification process created unnecessary friction for customers.
I redesigned it to ask for what the business needed without making customers work harder than necessary to continue shopping.
2. Making a large catalogue easier to search
As the catalogue grew, finding the right product couldn't depend on customers endlessly browsing.
I designed real-time search and filtering so customers could narrow the catalogue and immediately see how their choices affected the results.
3. Designing for customers unfamiliar with African prints
Selling globally introduced another problem: not every customer understood the names and categories used for African prints.
So the product couldn't assume cultural knowledge. I designed the browsing and tagging experience to help customers understand what they were looking at while still preserving the identity of the products.
Designing the business to scale
I wasn't designing individual screens. I was thinking about what would happen when Afrikstabel had more products, more orders and more customers.
So I built reusable components, designed customer and admin workflows together, and accounted for a growing catalogue and international customers from the beginning.
The result
Afrikstabel moved from a heavily manual sales process toward a digital system built around how the business actually operates.
Instead of relying on WhatsApp for everything, the product gave customers ways to discover, evaluate and buy products themselves while giving the business tools to manage those interactions as it grew.
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Posted Mar 1, 2025
Afrikstabel was running orders manually through WhatsApp and social media. I designed the product system they needed to scale those operations.
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Timeline
Jan 15, 2025 - Feb 27, 2025
