PricePally, a Nigerian online grocery start-up known for group-buying, is testing grocery exports to drive revenue growth after a slump in its B2B segment. Its B2B procurement service, which contributed a quarter of revenue, shrank to 10% in 2024 after a sharp naira devaluation and food inflation.
Founded in 2019, PricePally built a following among millennials with bulk-buying deals, enabling users to make group purchases of staples like rice, yam, tomatoes, etc. In 2021, it expanded its services to B2B procurement for hotels and restaurants, reaching 25% of revenue by 2023, according to chief executive officer Luther Lawoyin. However, due to the economic turmoil, many restaurants were paying very late, Lawoyin said in an interview.
Late payment cycles are a persistent challenge in B2B e-commerce platforms, Lawoyin acknowledged. Those cycles which were typically 2 weeks, stretched into three months for some businesses.
Procurement start-ups like Vendease have turned these cash flow challenges into revenue opportunities. Vendease, which recently laid off staff to extend its runway, has evolved to capitalise on its financing model, now charging daily interest rates, instead of flat interest rates, on the value of goods bought on credit.
PricePally paused B2B operations, resuming them in 2025 as conditions improved. “The economy looks much better than last year,” he noted.
Still, this economic uncertainty motivated PricePally’s export push. Exports now target diaspora demand, shipping bi-monthly non-perishables like ogbono and crayfish, via air and sea. US tariffs, many of which were tightened under President Donald Trump, will increase landing costs, yet Lawoyin sees an edge: “Some Nigerian stores abroad, often run by Pakistanis, face high overheads.” Pricepally’s direct-from-farmer sourcing cuts prices, undercutting competitors in those countries. He says this was always on Pricepally’s roadmap, but last year’s turbulence and demand from users who migrated sped it up. “We believe African food has a place on the world stage, and Pricepally will help take it there.”
The company is also working on a chatbot, April, that will enable in-WhatsApp orders and facilitate budget-based fractional purchases, moving the start-up beyond bulk orders to drive growth. This can also increase access to the company’s e-commerce platform; approximately 51 million people in Nigeria use WhatsApp.
This bot is a significant improvement to a 2022 USSD version which did not catch on at the time. “Typing commands was probably hard for users,” Lawoyin said, explaining the low uptake in 2022. Set for a 2024 rollout, April uses natural language processing to initiate and complete orders. It also introduces ‘fractional commerce’, as Lawoyin puts it; letting users buy fractions of bulk orders they would have bought with a group of users. “This way, they can buy like ₦5,000 of a ₦20,000 rice sack,” Lawoyin explained. “They can also simply tell the bot what they need to buy and how much they have, and it will create [a cart] for them based on their budget.”
April is also capable of image recognition; it converts handwritten lists into digital carts, reducing errors.
For its growing B2B clients, April will eventually be able to automate phone orders, trimming the costs of running those tasks through human staff. Lawoyin ruled out layoffs: “We’ll redeploy staff as we scale.” Challenges persist—April’s responses can stray—but Pricepally is refining it with YarnGPT, a local language model that trains bots to speak with a Nigerian accent.
