I was selling online the way most of us do — orders buried in my WhatsApp, customers’ details in an exercise book, and a few riders I paid to move goods across Lagos.
One evening a rider took nearly ₦180,000 worth of stock out for delivery and simply… stopped picking my calls. No system told me what he was carrying. No record showed which orders were his. I sat in my shop that night with a biro and a notebook, trying to remember what I had sent out — and I couldn’t. I lost the goods. I lost the customers.
That wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was realising it had been happening for months, in small pieces. Ghost buyers who ordered and vanished at the door. WhatsApp chats that almost became sales, then went cold. Returns I never tracked. Money I couldn’t reconcile at the end of the day. I was “busy” and “growing” — but my profit was leaking out of a hundred tiny holes I couldn’t even see.
So I looked for software to fix it. Everything I found was built for businesses abroad — subscriptions in dollars, no pay-on-delivery, no concept of a rider carrying stock, no WhatsApp. None of it understood how we actually sell in Nigeria.
My own business stopped bleeding. Then other sellers saw it and asked for it. That is TexaCRM. It wasn’t dreamed up in an office. It was built in the trenches of Nigerian eCommerce — by someone who lost the money first, so you don’t have to.
