“DM for Price”

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Startup: Zealock
Location: Nigeria

Buying anything online in Nigeria is an exercise in trust issues, caution, and secrecy. It goes something like this. You spot a product you like on some social platform, say IG or WhatsApp status.

Typically, these posts carry a caption that tells you what you’re looking at. The only catch is, half the time, there’s no price tag. This is because Nigerians have a ritual they do before buying anything. It’s called haggling. The seller names a price, the buyer names their price, and they do a little tug of price war till they find a price that works for both people.

This system works great in real life. On the internet, it morphs into a popular phrase: “DM for price”. For sellers, they’re trying to size you up, protect themselves from future price changes, and also get the best deal out of you. For buyers, this allows for haggling, yes, but it also makes them defensive and distrustful. They have to trust that the price is fair, the product is real, and the vendor will deliver.

This is the behavioral cost of social commerce - the default way most Nigerians buy things online. Whatsapp, the most popular chat app in Nigeria, is also the default storefront for millions of informal businesses. It’s the place where conversations turn into transactions every single day. But it’s quite siloed. Sellers are trapped inside their own contact lists, and buyers are limited to vendors they already follow.

When sellers want to reach new buyers, their only options are to spam random numbers on WhatsApp, or buy Instagram and Facebook ads. The first one is just a blatant breach of privacy, and the second is expensive, generic, and increasingly getting tuned out. But what if there was a third option?

Emmanuel Nwoye and Richard Gigi, the co-founders of Zealock, think there should be. So they created Zealock.

Zealock takes thousands of whatsapp, Instagram, and TikTok stores and puts their catalogs on one site, allowing you to search through items and categories just like you would on Amazon. But instead of being one giant seller holding a lot of inventory, Zealock is built on thousands of vendors on social media.

Here’s what the experience looks and feels like.

For sellers, Zealock uses AI to read a product from their social media posts and catalog, then turns these product details into a structured listing showing the item’s picture, details, and price on its homepage. It also files it into the right category. This gives social sellers a digital storefront while making them easy to discover.

For buyers, Zealock built two smaller products. The first is Sisi, a Nigerian word that means “sister”. Sisi is an AI chatbot that helps you find products, contact buyers, and find the right haggling price. If a product is unavailable, it gets added to your “Wanted List”, and you’re notified once it’s available.

The second is Showcase, a browsing experience similar to flipping through Whatsapp stories, except you’re flipping through product listings from different seller categories.

One cool thing about Zealock is that it’s built for LLM product search. While typical product sites are great at Search Engine Optimization (SEO), they’re big on AEO and GEO (answer-engine and generative-engine optimization). This means as more Nigerians start asking chatGPT for product recommendations, sellers on Zealock will get discovered.

They’re also solving for trust. Every user is tied to a verified phone number through WhatsApp, with optional seller verification badges, listing moderation, and reporting tools being rolled out to keep scammers out.

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Note: Traction shared in this edition is based on information provided by the founders.

Zealock has had two product launches, with its second one happening just three weeks ago. So far, they’ve grown* to:

• ~2,000 users

• 1,500+ items listed across 20+ categories, including real estate, vehicles, and electronics

• An estimated ₦100 million in inventory value sitting on the platform

• Roughly ₦20 million in sales driven through it

• About 5,000 chats per week flowing through the system

On revenue, Zealock monetises mainly through its sellers:

• Monthly subscriptions from ₦2,000 to ₦7,000, depending on the tier

• A ₦500 one-time “test payment”, a low-commitment way to get a seller’s first card into the system

• AI credit packs for buyers, to cover the cost of chatbot usage

Zealock is also inventing an ad product called “the ad bucket”. Instead of every seller separately burning cash on Facebook ads, sellers pool funds into collective promotional campaigns.

Those campaigns lean on humans, influencers and word-of-mouth referrers who earn a commission for sending in genuinely high-intent buyers. Given how much of this market already runs on “who do you know,” that’s a smart addition.

Conversational commerce isn’t a future trend in Nigeria. It’s already the dominant way people buy and sell, powered by cheap mobile data, a culture that prefers to negotiate and interact with a human, even if through digital channels.

There’s a simultaneous shift towards AI-search among consumers, threatening to reshuffle product discovery dominance. Zealock is placing itself where both waves meet.

But there are real things to prove.

1. Defensibility. “A marketplace on top of WhatsApp” is powerful precisely because WhatsApp is open, which also means the barrier for a copycat is mostly execution and distribution, not technology. Zealock’s edge has to come from liquidity (the most listings and the most buyers) and from owning AI-search discovery early. Both are winnable, but still quite the race.

2. Leakage. Like every chat-based marketplace, Zealock faces the question of what stops a buyer and seller from connecting once and then transacting privately forever after. The answer can’t be friction; it has to be value: better discovery, more buyers, and trust infrastructure good enough that staying on Zealock is simply the safer choice.

3. The last point brings us to escrow. Right now the platform connects buyers and sellers, but the actual money still moves on faith. An escrow feature, holding funds until a deal is confirmed, would do two big things at once: meaningfully cut fraud, and unlock the high-ticket categories (real estate, vehicles) where trust is the only thing standing between Zealock and far larger transaction values. For a marketplace already listing ₦100M of inventory, escrow seems like the next unlock.

Zealock is attacking a massive, real, structurally underserved market with a genuinely clever wedge; meet sellers where they already are, make their goods discoverable, and ride the AI-search wave before the incumbents wake up.

The early engagement (5,000 chats a week off a three-week-old V2) suggests the product has a pulse. The path from here runs through three things: building escrow to win trust and high-ticket deals, converting raw users into paying subscribers, and out-executing the inevitable copycats on liquidity. We’ll be watching this one slide into the market.

What do you think? Is Zealock a winner?

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