You know the shelf. A carton you bought in the rainy season, a stack of phone cases for a model people have stopped asking for, a fan that looked like a sure thing. Every time you walk past, you tell yourself you'll deal with it. Then you don't, because nothing about it is urgent today. Dead stock is goods you hold th
You have three Samsung A15s on the shelf. Same model, same black, same 128GB. In the stock book they are one line: "A15 128GB black, 3". On Tuesday you sell one. On Friday a customer walks in and says her phone has stopped charging, and it is still under warranty. Which one did you sell her? Is the phone in her hand t
Your newest attendant is at the till. A customer asks for a better price on a ₦45,000 blender, and the attendant opens the stock sheet to check how low she can go. The sheet shows what you paid, ₦31,000, and what the shop makes on it. Now she knows your margin. Next week she also knows it for every item on the shelf.
A trader from the next market takes 40 pairs of slippers and sandals from you on a Monday. He'll pay for what he sells and bring back the rest. Three weeks later he comes back with some money, a bag of shoes and a different memory of the price you agreed. Nobody has to be dishonest for this to go wrong. The price for
Tunde closes at 8pm. Blessing opens at 8am. They haven't spoken since Tuesday. At 10am a woman walks in and says she paid ₦42,000 by transfer last night and was told to come back for her goods this morning. Blessing has never seen her. There's a carton under the counter with no name on it. Tunde's phone is off because
You open the shop yourself most days, so you've never written down how. You count the float without thinking. You know the freezer hums a certain way when it's working. You know which socket not to use. Then you travel for a burial, your sales girl opens for three days, and you come back to a freezer of spoiled chicke
It's the 28th and you're working out salaries. You're sure Chinedu missed two days this month. He says one, and that the other was the day you sent him to Mile 12 for tomatoes. You honestly can't remember. Neither can he, not with certainty. You'll either pay him for a day he may not have worked or dock him for a day
On Thursday night you tell Blessing she's opening on Saturday. On Saturday at 8am the shop is locked, Blessing says you told her Sunday, and the customer who came for two cartons of noodles has gone next door. Nobody lied. The roster was in your head, and a roster in your head is one that each person remembers differe
Search for this and you'll find answers from ₦500,000 to ₦20 million. They can't all be describing the same shop, and they aren't. A kiosk-sized provision store in Ilorin and an air-conditioned mini mart in Lekki share a name and almost nothing else. So instead of handing you one figure, this guide shows where the mon
The sales book templates you find online were mostly designed for a shop that takes cash. A Nigerian shop takes cash, bank transfers and POS, often all three within ten minutes. A book with one "Amount" column can't tell you why the money in the drawer is ₦40,000 less than the sales total, when the answer is simply tha
Ask a shop owner how much customers owe them and you'll usually get a pause, then a guess. The real figure is spread across the back pages of the sales book, a few scraps of paper, and memory. That's why credit hurts small shops so badly. It isn't that people never pay. It's that nobody is keeping score, so nobody is
You'll have heard two things this year. One is that small businesses no longer pay tax. The other is that everyone now has to register and file. Both are passed around with confidence, and both leave out the part that matters to a shop owner. This is a plain summary of how the rules apply to a small shop. It is genera
A customer picks ₦85,000 of goods, makes a transfer, and holds up their phone: "Successful." Your attendant sees the green tick, packs the goods, and the customer leaves. That evening the bank app shows nothing. It never will. Fake transfers work because shops confirm payment by looking at the customer's phone. The wh
First in, first out means the goods that came into your shop first are the first to leave. It sounds too obvious to need a name. But it describes two separate things, and a shop needs both. One is physical: which tin you hand to the customer. The other is arithmetic: which cost you use when you work out your profit.
A delivery is the moment your money turns into stock, and it's the moment most shops check least. The truck is blocking the road, the driver is in a hurry, customers are waiting, and someone signs the waybill without counting. Whatever was short, damaged or swapped in that delivery is now your loss, and your signature
Two provision stores on the same street can carry the same goods at the same prices and take very different money. Often the difference is simply that in one of them you can see what's for sale. Arranging a shop isn't decoration. It decides what customers notice, how fast your attendant can serve, how easily things ge
In a walk-in shop the customer is the one moving, so the layout does your selling for you. A good one leads people past more of your goods, makes things easy to find, and lets one person at the till see most of the room. You don't need a designer. You need a sketch and a few rules. Draw it before you move anything T
A lot of successful retailers reach the same thought: I already sell twenty cartons of this a week, why am I buying from a middleman? Becoming a distributor looks like the natural next step. It can be. It's also a different business from retail, with thinner margins, bigger sums and customers who buy on credit. This g
"Is the shop making money?" sounds like a question with an obvious answer. Customers are coming, goods are leaving, there's cash at the end of the day. But plenty of shop owners in that position are slowly getting poorer, and they only find out when they can't afford to restock. The reason is that sales aren't profit,
Ask ten shop owners what profit they make on an item and most will say something like "I add 20%". Ask what share of their sales is profit and they'll say 20% again. Those two can't both be true, and the gap between them is real money. Two numbers that sound alike For example, say an item costs you ₦1,000 and you sel
Selling on credit puts a shop owner in an awkward spot. The people who owe you are your neighbours, your regulars, sometimes your relatives. Ask too hard and you lose a customer. Don't ask and you lose the money, then the customer anyway, because people avoid shops where they owe. Most of the work of collecting a debt
Before you pay anyone for barcodes, work out which of three situations you are in. Two of them don't need a registered barcode at all, and a lot of small businesses pay for one they didn't need. Do you actually need one? You run a shop and sell other companies' products. You don't need to buy barcodes. The tin of mil
When Jiji adverts aren't bringing calls, the first instinct is to pay for promotion. Sometimes that's right. More often the advert itself is the problem, and paying only shows a weak advert to more people. Go through these first. They cost nothing. Get approved, and stay approved An advert nobody can see gets no cus
Most stock sheets people download are too clever. They have dashboards and macros, and they break the first time someone types in the wrong cell. A stock record that survives daily use in a shop is plain. It has three tabs and four formulas. It works the same in Excel and in Google Sheets. The idea Never type a bala
Stock is where a shop's money lives. A provision store with ₦3 million of goods on the shelves and ₦40,000 in the drawer has nearly all its wealth in tins and cartons. Yet most owners count the ₦40,000 every night and the ₦3 million once a year. Stock control sounds like something for supermarkets with scanners. It is
The first shop taught you everything by standing in it. You know which customers pay late, which shelf empties first, and roughly what a good Tuesday looks like. Then you open a second branch, and discover that none of that knowledge travelled with you. A second shop isn't the first shop again. It's the first shop wit
A boutique has a problem a provision store doesn't. A tin of milk bought in March is still a tin of milk in September. A dress bought in March is, by September, last season's dress in the three sizes nobody wanted. In clothing, stock loses value just by sitting. Nearly everything about running a boutique well follows
Cosmetics is a good trade for a small shop. The goods are compact, customers come back regularly, and the profit on each item is usually better than on provisions. It also has four traps: fakes, expiry dates, too many variations, and stock that's small enough to leave in a handbag. A cosmetics shop does well when it m
A provision store can be full of customers from morning to night and still leave its owner with nothing at the end of the year. It's one of the commonest stories in Nigerian retail: the shop is always busy, the shelves are always stocked, and the owner still borrows to restock in January. The reason is built into the
There is a kind of shop owner who hasn't travelled for a wedding in four years. Not because the business is failing. Because it only works when they are standing in it. When you ask why, the answer is nearly always the same: "If I'm not there, things go missing." What that usually means is that the owner is the system
Putting your goods on Jiji is not the hard part. The posting form takes a few minutes. The hard part comes later, when someone calls from across town about the blue one, drives over, and finds you sold it yesterday. This guide covers both: getting adverts live, and running Jiji alongside a physical shop without disapp
Your customers are already on WhatsApp. Many of them already message you there: "Do you have the big size?" "How much is it now?" "Keep one for me." Selling on WhatsApp isn't something new to learn. It's a matter of doing properly what's already happening by accident. For a shop, that mostly means two things: making i
A provision retailer and a provision wholesaler handle the same cartons and run very different businesses. The retailer opens the carton and sells the tins one by one at a good margin. The wholesaler sells the carton whole, earns a small amount on it, and has to sell a great many. If you're moving from retail into who
The shop is busy. Customers come in all day; the shelves empty and get refilled, and the sales book looks healthy. Then you sit down at the end of the month, and the money doesn't match the goods that left. Not by a frightening amount. Just enough that you start watching people. In August 2025, police in Niger State a
The reason most shops take stock once a year, if at all, is that it means locking the door for a day. A day closed is a day's sales gone, so the count keeps getting moved to next month. You don't have to close. Count the shop in pieces, one section at a time, while it stays open. A provision store split into six secti
A receipt is the smallest record in a shop and one of the most useful. It's the customer's proof that they paid. It's your proof of what you sold, to whom, and for how much. And when every sale gets one, from a numbered booklet, it becomes a control that makes it much harder for a sale to vanish. Writing a good one ta
The usual answer online is yes, very, followed by a claim that you can double your money on every charger. The markup on individual accessories can be high. That's true, and it's also why so many people open these shops and why so many close within a year. Profit on an item and profit in a business are different thing
Sooner or later every seller on Jiji asks the same question: my adverts are live, the calls are slow, should I pay to promote them? This article explains how Jiji's paid options are organised and gives you a way to answer that question with your own numbers. One thing first. We haven't listed prices here. Jiji shows
People ask which is better as though they were two versions of the same thing. They aren't. They work in opposite ways, and which suits you depends on what you sell and how much of the selling you want to do yourself. The descriptions below are drawn from each company's own seller pages as they stood on 6 October 2026
These two terms come up the moment you try to work out your profit, and they are simpler than the textbooks make them sound. Opening stock is the value of the goods you had at the start of a period. Closing stock is the value of the goods you had at the end of it. The period can be a week, a month or a year. And one
Every shop spends small amounts all day. The loader wants ₦1,500. The generator needs fuel. Someone has to buy nylon bags, pay the refuse collector, get water. In most shops that money comes straight out of the sales drawer, and nobody writes it down. By evening the cash is ₦11,000 short of the sales total, and no one
"POS" means three different things in Nigeria, and a lot of confusion comes from mixing them up. Before you compare prices, be sure which one you're shopping for. We haven't listed device prices or transaction charges here. They vary by provider, they change often, and we couldn't confirm a current set from the provid
Every shop owner knows the feeling of telling a regular customer "it has finished, come back on Thursday" and watching them walk to the shop next door. Running out of a fast seller costs more than the one sale. It teaches the customer where else to go. The reorder level is the number that prevents this. It is the stoc
Most shop owners hire with two pieces of paper: an agreement the new attendant signs, and a form signed by someone who vouches for them. Usually both were copied from another shop, and nobody is sure what half the lines are for. Each document does a different job. Here is what belongs in each, and what you shouldn't e
Most sales attendants in small shops are hired with one sentence: "You will be selling." Everything else is learned by being shouted at. Then the owner is surprised that the sales book is empty, the shelves are dusty and nobody counted the cash. People do the job they were told about. If recording sales was never name
Every shop has a shelf of it. The cream a rep talked you into, the phone cases for a model nobody carries now, the carton of a drink that sold well for one December. You stopped seeing it months ago. It isn't harmless. Those goods are money you already spent and can't use. Meanwhile you may be turning customers away b
People searching for the cost of opening a pharmacy usually want one number. We aren't going to give one. Rents, fit-out and stock vary too much by city and size, official fees change, and we couldn't confirm a current figure we'd stand behind. What we can give you is the order things have to happen in, and the list o
These two get confused because they look almost the same and record the same goods. The difference is where each one is kept, who writes on it, and whether it shows money. The short version A bin card stays with the goods. It hangs on the shelf or sits in the bin, and records quantities only: what came in, what went
Most stock books fail for the same reason. Everything goes on one page, in the order it happened, and by the second week nobody can tell how many tins of milk are meant to be on the shelf without reading forty lines. The fix is one page per item. Each product gets its own page, and that page only ever answers one ques
Counting a pharmacy is harder than counting most shops, for three reasons. There are far more products, often well over a thousand lines in a small space. Many are tiny and expensive. And every one of them has a date after which it can't be sold. In a provision store, a count asks "how many?" In a pharmacy it has to a
The posts we point people to first.
The sales book templates you find online were mostly designed for a shop that takes cash. A Nigerian shop takes cash, bank transfers and POS, often all three within ten minutes. A book with one "Amount" column can't tell you why the money in the drawer is ₦40,000 less than the sales total, when the answer is simply tha
Stock is where a shop's money lives. A provision store with ₦3 million of goods on the shelves and ₦40,000 in the drawer has nearly all its wealth in tins and cartons. Yet most owners count the ₦40,000 every night and the ₦3 million once a year. Stock control sounds like something for supermarkets with scanners. It is
There is a kind of shop owner who hasn't travelled for a wedding in four years. Not because the business is failing. Because it only works when they are standing in it. When you ask why, the answer is nearly always the same: "If I'm not there, things go missing." What that usually means is that the owner is the system
Putting your goods on Jiji is not the hard part. The posting form takes a few minutes. The hard part comes later, when someone calls from across town about the blue one, drives over, and finds you sold it yesterday. This guide covers both: getting adverts live, and running Jiji alongside a physical shop without disapp
The shop is busy. Customers come in all day; the shelves empty and get refilled, and the sales book looks healthy. Then you sit down at the end of the month, and the money doesn't match the goods that left. Not by a frightening amount. Just enough that you start watching people. In August 2025, police in Niger State a
The reason most shops take stock once a year, if at all, is that it means locking the door for a day. A day closed is a day's sales gone, so the count keeps getting moved to next month. You don't have to close. Count the shop in pieces, one section at a time, while it stays open. A provision store split into six secti
Most stock books fail for the same reason. Everything goes on one page, in the order it happened, and by the second week nobody can tell how many tins of milk are meant to be on the shelf without reading forty lines. The fix is one page per item. Each product gets its own page, and that page only ever answers one ques
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