“What I ordered vs what I got” posts on social media are humorous. But beyond the laughs, it is a real fear of people who buy things, especially from businesses on social media where there is usually no refund mechanism.
This was why Ifeoluwa Wole-Osho created Aje, a blockchain-powered social commerce platform that ensures buyers or sellers are happy.
Aje is the Yoruba deity for wealth and prosperity. The name is used frequently by traders in the marketplace to wish each other success and profit in business, and thus, fits perfectly.
Wole-Osho was motivated to solve this problem because of a “what I ordered vs what I did not get” situation that saw him end up at a police station to answer some questions.
He was neither the buyer nor the seller. During his Energy Systems Engineering PhD programme in Turkey, where he was the President of the African Students Union, the WhatsApp group he created for students was used to rent out a non-existing apartment to seven students.
The scam that happened on the group gave him an idea. ”I started thinking that there could be something that could solve this problem — an escrow service,” he noted.
Escrow services already existed, but Wale-Osho’s idea was to add a block chain layer to the social commerce platform to create transparency.
How does Aje work?
Described as a social marketplace, Aje is a platform where people can buy and sell but also relate socially. But for now, Wale-Osho says there’s more focus on the market than on the social.
Explaining how the platform works, he says users are greeted with something like an explore page where they see products available for sale or products requested by a buyer.
When a buyer requests to purchase an item, a trade negotiation window opens for 24 hours. The buyer and seller negotiate not only the price but everything else, including how the product will be delivered, the delivery fee, and when it will be delivered.
Once negotiations have been concluded, a smart contract with everything that has been agreed upon will be created, and all that information is stored on the block chain. Once both parties sign the contract, the trade window stays open, and the payment for the product goes from the buyer’s wallet and stays with Aje until the product is delivered.
If the buyer is satisfied with the product delivered, the payment in escrow is then sent to the seller.
“If a dispute arises, you can automate the dispute response by clicking the dispute button,” Wale-Osho says, “and then one of our trade administrators will come into the chat and review all of the evidence, both in the form of conversation and uploads that each person has posted. The administrator will then try as fairly as possible to resolve the disputes.”
Where the blockchain comes in
While Aje’s solution is to eliminate scams on the social marketplace with blockchain, the technology does little to address this problem. Although a smart contract is created and the agreed terms between buyer and seller are stored on the blockchain, the technology doesn’t particularly help with resolving disputes.
“I still think having the human elements to dispute resolution is going to be a long-term solution,” Wole-Osho agrees.
However, there’s an important problem blockchain solves on Aje and that’s cross-border transactions.
Payment on Aje is made through a wallet that holds stable coins. Users can fund the wallet through a payment gateway in their local currency and sellers will receive the stable coins in their wallet and then withdraw from it in their local currency.
“Every price on the market is automatically adjusted to the currency of the country you’re in. So if it is a PS4, it might be $500 for the person in the US and ₺17,500 for the person seeing it in Turkey,” says the founder.
This system makes it possible for people in different countries to buy and sell. This is particularly important to Wale-Osho because as a student in Turkey, he knew graduates who were already back in Nigeria needed to sell property in Turkey.
This distinct feature serves as a competitive advantage for Aje as similar platforms like Jiji do not have this feature. The key selling point of the platform — the escrow service — is also an advantage.
However, Wole-Osho reveals that Aje has some unlikely competitors like PocketApp, which has an escrow service. According to PocketApp’s terms and conditions page, “Escrow payment model is a feature on this website that holds payment until the Purchaser and Vendor on this website have fulfilled their due requirements in the transaction.”
This is a feature similar to Aje’s. However, the competitive advantage is that Aje allows easy cross-border payments.
This same competitive advantage is what Aje has over Vhalid, a startup that provides escrow service to two transacting parties on any platform.
These advantages could be the reason Aje now has 7,000 users since it was launched in 2023. However, with a $1 charge on transactions and 4,000 transactions completed, Aje has only made $4,000 in revenue.
The company has the potential to increase its revenue through currency exchange gains, but Wole-Osho does not want to explore this option yet; the most important objective for Aje now is user acquisition.
The main user acquisition strategy is going around universities in Nigeria and introducing the platform to students through WhatsApp groups and intern marketers that actually go to these schools.
Wole-Osho believes that “as a social media kind of platform, having social proof is more important than revenue.”
However, he isn’t dogmatic about the company’s direction. He says the company is in the early stages, and they are open to all kinds of advice and even a pivot if necessary.
Aje is also open to funding. It was bootstrapped until December 2024 when it received $25,000 from the Startup boot camp accelerator.
But when your competitor’s range from massive e-commerce platforms like Jumia to Jiji, your only competitive advantage might just be the amount of funding received.
