Payaza Launches Shopaza to Empower Small Businesses Globally

In June 2026, Payaza launched Shopaza, an AI-powered e-commerce platform operating across 23 countries in Africa, North America, and Europe to facilitate cross-border sales for small businesses. The platform enables merchants to develop online stores, manage inventory, and leverage AI for product descriptions and pricing to enhance global scalability.

The Future of E-Commerce for African Businesses is Finally Here

This launch addresses challenges faced by African businesses, which currently account for only 2% of the USD 3.88 trillion global e-commerce market. It also noted that 56% of Nigerian micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises still depend on social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Instagram, often managing sales and invoicing manually.

Shopaza offers a structured digital commerce environment, featuring verified merchant onboarding, secure payment processing, buyer protection, and real-time transaction confirmations. Powered by Payaza’s payment infrastructure, it aims to simplify online selling and boost cross-border trade.

Seyi Ebenezer, a fintech expert, emphasized that Shopaza is built on principles of creating sustainable value for entrepreneurs struggling to reach wider markets by simplifying online selling. This launch is part of Payaza’s mission to enhance e-commerce and digital payment infrastructure in Africa, helping businesses compete in a connected marketplace.

Significance and Future Perspective

This launch allows merchants to build online stores, manage inventory, and process payments across borders, with AI-native capabilities that enable frictionless store creation by uploading a single image, eliminating hours of manual data entry. It also targets informal traders by offering unified inventory, orders, and payments. Cross-border trade solutions to seamlessly sell to customers in international markets. Ecosystem integration enables the company to offer embedded services like analytics and lending to its merchants.

As the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) progresses, Shopaza is well-positioned to capitalize on regional trade. Shift toward Autonomous Commerce provides personalized customer retention tools without manual merchant intervention. By owning both the payment and commerce layers, Shopaza will directly compete with established platforms offering storefront tools. It also empowers diaspora-focused commerce, helping international buyers discover and buy products directly from local merchants and expanding global reach.

Impact on the ICT Industry

This launch makes a positive impact on the ICT industry by transforming payments from a standalone service into an integrated commerce layer. By embedding AI and cross-border payment processing into a single platform, it directly empowers informal social commerce sellers to participate in the formal digital economy.

The ICT industry is experiencing a transformative shift driven by platform democratization, which dramatically lowers the costs and technical barriers for SMEs to launch digital storefronts. Concurrently, FinTech value addition also evolves traditional payment gateways into comprehensive SaaS providers, while global market expansion equips regional merchants with multi-currency tools to access international markets seamlessly.

Shopaza revolutionizes e-commerce by mitigating the common industry challenges through AI-driven automation, flexible design and templates, enhanced trust, and borderless transactions. Merchants save significant setup time through AI-generated inventories, access versatile templates for diverse business models, build buyer confidence through verified protections and real-time confirmation, and ultimately process international sales seamlessly across 23 regions.

Impact of Artificial Intelligence in E-commerce Industry

The global artificial intelligence in e-commerce market size is calculated at USD 9.01 billion in 2025 and is predicted to increase from USD 11.21 billion in 2026 to approximately USD 74.93 billion by 2035, expanding at a CAGR of 23.59% from 2026 to 2035.

According to Precedence Research, this launch impacts the industry by streamlining how small and medium-sized enterprises build and scale their businesses by addressing cross-border payments and informal social commerce limitations through targeted AI and financial infrastructure integrations.

Recent tech advancements are democratizing digital storefronts by enabling small merchants to build customized, professional storefronts without technical expertise. This empowers informal businesses, such as those that depend on WhatsApp or Instagram, to transform into legitimate, cross-border brands. Concurrently, fintechs are expanding from simple payment processing into holistic e-commerce management to provide all-in-one management solutions for logistics and multi-currency transactions.

Shopaza overcomes the industry limitations by providing an all-in-one platform featuring AI-powered onboarding that automates store creation, eliminating the time-consuming process of manual store creation, enabling merchants to easily scale internationally through multi-currency support. Additionally, it centralizes fragmented workflows and facilitates trusted payment-on-delivery models by integrating vetted logistics and dispatch networks.

About Payaza

Payaza is a comprehensive pan-African digital payment infrastructure company mainly designed to manage local and cross-border transactions seamlessly across multiple currencies. It actively empowers businesses of all sizes through developer-friendly APIs, AI-driven e-commerce tools like Shopaza, no-code payment links, WhatsApp-based ChatPay, and specialized branch and event ticketing solutions.

This has a major goal to link up African businesses and the global digital economy by providing an accessible and secure financial backbone. The company is dedicated to empowering micro, small, and medium enterprises by eliminating the technical and geographical barriers to cross-border trade, thereby driving financial inclusion and economic growth across high-growth markets.