Company brief · September 2026

Run the business. Leave the admin to us.

ArtizanSquare is a Nigerian marketplace and management system built to remove admin work from small business owners — the vendors selling on WhatsApp and Instagram, the salons, spas, restaurants and clinics, and the independent artizans. An AI assistant answers their customers, closes sales and takes bookings inside the chat, so the owner only has to do the work itself.

MarketNigeria, naira-denominated
SidesCustomers · Vendors · Artizans · Businesses
SurfacesWeb app · iOS · Android · WhatsApp · Instagram · Facebook
ModelSubscription + transaction
01

What the company actually is

Two businesses share one platform. The first is a marketplace: customers search, compare and book real service providers near them, and every provider gets a public page carrying their services, prices, gallery and reviews. The second is the management system those providers run their day on — a calendar, a visit board, deposits, memberships, staff permissions, payouts, analytics and a unified social inbox.

The two halves are not separate products bolted together. The marketplace is what makes the management system worth paying for, and the management system is what makes the marketplace listings accurate. A salon keeps its hours current in the dashboard because that is where its diary lives; the customer searching at 9pm sees hours that are true because of it.

The wedge is a specific, unglamorous problem. A Nigerian service business today takes a booking through an Instagram DM, confirms it on WhatsApp, writes it in a paper book, and checks a bank app to see whether the customer paid. Four systems, none of which talk to each other, and the walk-in who came through the door without booking leaves no record at all. ArtizanSquare replaces the four with one, and makes the walk-in a customer record.

The same problem is sharper for the Instagram and WhatsApp vendor — the food seller, the clothing brand, the hair vendor — whose entire shop is a DM thread. So vendors now sell on ArtizanSquare too, and they sell where their customers already are. The assistant shows the product, takes the order and collects payment inside WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook, and the vendor still ends up with proper records of who bought what and when.

What we are striving for is simple to state: a small business owner should not have to do admin work at all. Answering “how much?”, chasing payment, writing things down, following up, asking for reviews, working out what sold — the platform does it. The owner cooks, sews, styles or delivers.

Nobody is short of customers. They are short of the hours a day it takes to answer, chase, confirm, record and follow up on the ones they already have.

02

Two kinds of provider, one distinction that decides everything

The platform recognises exactly two kinds of seller, and the line between them is not size or sophistication. It is who travels.

Artizan

Goes to the customer

An individual professional working home-service, strictly. They have no premises a customer visits. The personal trainer, the chiropractor, the makeup artist, the mobile hairdresser, the tailor collecting measurements at your house. The job happens at the customer's address, so the address is part of the booking.

  • Team size — one. A business of one pair of hands.
  • Booking carries— the customer's address, plus a note for the gate, the landmark, the flat number.
  • Never has — branches, staff rotas, a visit board, or memberships.
  • Dashboard — the Artizan Dashboard.
Business · Shop · Venue

The customer comes to them

An owned or rented premises with a door, and usually a team behind it. The salon, the spa, the restaurant, the dental clinic, the hotel. Because there is a room, there are walk-ins, a front desk, staff who need some access but not all of it, and — eventually — a second location.

  • Team size — up to unlimited, with per-area permissions.
  • Booking carries — no address; the venue is the address.
  • Only they get — walk-in visits, branches, memberships, staff roles, a logo and hero gallery.
  • Dashboard — the Business Workspace.

This distinction is built into the foundation, not just the interface. Both kinds of provider share one booking system, and a booking belongs to a business or to an artizan — never both, never neither. Whether it is a home-service job then follows from that single fact, which is why one calendar, one payment flow and one settlement path serve both sides without either being a special case.

Selling productsis an offering, not a third kind of provider. A vendor signs up as either kind and chooses “I sell products” — the home kitchen that delivers is an artizan-shaped business; the boutique with a shop floor is a venue. Both get the catalogue, in-chat orders and in-chat payment.

03

Who ArtizanSquare is for

Five audiences, with genuinely different reasons to open the app.

Audience one

The customer who needs something done

Wants a table on Friday, a haircut before a wedding, or a spa session today. Searches by category and location, compares real prices and real galleries, reads reviews, books a slot and secures it with a deposit. They never see a dashboard.

Audience two

The venue owner with a diary and a team

Runs a salon, spa, restaurant, studio or clinic. The core paying customer. Comes for the bookings; stays for the deposits that stop no-shows, the memberships that make next month predictable, and the staff permissions that let the front desk work the door without seeing revenue.

Audience three

The artizan working for themselves

A tradesperson or mobile professional whose marketing is currently word of mouth and an Instagram page. Comes to be found — a profile that ranks, a booking link, and an assistant that answers DMs while both hands are busy.

Audience four

The vendor whose shop is their DMs

Sells food, clothes, hair or skincare through Instagram and WhatsApp and loses the customer every time they send a website link. Comes for an assistant that sells inside the chat, collects the money there and keeps the records — and for a notification that simply says “paid, deliver this”.

Audience five

The staff member on the floor

A receptionist, stylist or manager who never signed up but uses it daily. Invited by username, granted only the areas they need. The reason permissions are per-area rather than one admin switch.

Who it is not for

Warehouses and large retailers. Vendors can list products with prices, sizes and stock, and sell them in the chat — but there is no cost-of-goods accounting, no purchase orders and no courier network. The vendor still delivers; we remove everything around the delivery. A business that needs an ERP is not the shape this was built around, and saying so is cheaper than a churned customer.

04

The categories we currently cover

Twelve venue categories are curated and surfaced across the site. The underlying catalogue keeps growing — importing a Google Business Profile brings its own categories with it.

Venue categories — the curated set
Restaurant food
Hair Salon beauty
Barbershop beauty
Nail Studio beauty
Makeup Studio beauty
Spa wellness
Physiotherapy health
Dental Clinic health
Hotel hospitality
Fashion Design Studio craft
Photo Studio craft
Workhub space
Artizan trades — home service
Tailor craft
Hairdresser mobile beauty
Barber mobile beauty
Masseuse mobile beauty
Chiropractor mobile beauty
Spa mobile beauty
Nail Technician mobile beauty
physiotherapist health
Personal Trainer health
Photographer craft
Graphics Designer craft

One catalogue serves both sides of the marketplace: a category carries the name a customer browses by andthe skill an artizan claims, so “Hair Salon” and the person who does hair are the same entry seen from two directions. If your trade is not listed, it is usually a matter of adding it rather than building anything.

05

The full feature set

Grouped as an owner encounters them. Where a capability belongs to only one kind of provider, it says so.

Selling inside the chat

  • Product catalogue — photos, prices, sizes, stock and delivery areas with fees. Free for the first five products.
  • In-chat orders — the assistant builds the basket, suggests one matching extra and places the order with the total worked out, on WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook.
  • In-chat payment — a one-time transfer account or a card link sent in the conversation. No website, no redirect.
  • Held until delivery— order money is released to the vendor's bank account once the order is marked delivered.
  • Order records — who bought what, when, for how much, and whether it was delivered.
  • Comment-to-DM — anyone who comments on a post or ad gets a private message with the price and a way to buy. Included in the subscription.
  • “Paid — deliver this” notifications and a Monday report on what sold, what stalled and what to advertise.

Getting found

  • Public provider page — services, prices, gallery, hours and reviews, bookable directly.
  • Category and location search — down to Nigerian state, LGA and ward.
  • Connected Profile — builds the whole profile from Google Business, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp in about a minute, reconciles what they disagree on, and publishes corrections back to Google and WhatsApp.
  • Google review sync and Instagram-to-Google post forwarding, captions tidied for Google's format.
  • Custom booking link, and a custom domain on the top tier.
  • Verified badge via free KYC.
  • Profile boost — paid placement within search.

The diary

  • One calendar in month, week and day view, carrying online bookings and walk-ins together.
  • Drag to reschedule, with a confirmation step and an optional customer notification — an appointment is never moved silently.
  • Booking states — pending, accepted, completed, verified, cancelled.
  • Visit board (venues) — who is checked in right now, what they are having, what it comes to.
  • Check-out closes the visit, credits the wallet and fires the review request in one action.
  • Offline queue — bookings taken with no signal sync when it returns.
  • Live updates over websocket, with polling as fallback.

Money

  • Per-service deposits — percentage or fixed, showing the exact naira figure the customer will be charged before you save.
  • No-show settlement — states every amount before it moves money.
  • Payment methods — in-app transfer, payment link, or pay at the venue.
  • Provider wallet credited at checkout.
  • Payout records and a dispute route.
  • Memberships (venues) — recurring tiers whose entitlements are deducted automatically at check-in.
  • Escrow — deposits are held, then split on a defined settlement path.

Customers and communication

  • One inbox for Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp messages and post comments.
  • AI assistant answering from an editable business brief, with every claim traceable to its source.
  • AI booking — the assistant can take the slot, within limits you set and can see before switching it on.
  • Qualified leads — what a customer wants, their budget and timing, kept separate from what was merely inferred, and surviving the 14-day deletion of imported social messages.
  • Automations — trigger, conditions, action; the after-visit review request ships as an editable one, authored once and delivered as both email and WhatsApp.
  • WhatsApp Business templates with per-account submission and approval.
  • Campaigns and metered email, WhatsApp and AI allowances.

The team and the estate

  • Per-area staff permissions (venues) — analytics, staff, services, memberships, subscription, visit log, granted individually.
  • Invitations by username, accepted or declined by the person.
  • Branches (venues) — a venue network where each location keeps its own address and public page.
  • Owner-only surfaces — payouts and branches, whatever else is granted.
  • Passkeys, authenticator apps and recovery codes, shared across both dashboards because security is an account concern.

Knowing what happened

  • Analytics — visits, revenue from completed visits, unique customers, tracked bookings and payment mix over any range.
  • Advanced analytics and API access on the top tier.
  • Setup checklist — what is still missing from the venue.
  • Reviews collected automatically after every visit.
  • In-app feedback — a direct channel to us carrying platform, build and screen, so a bug report is reproducible.
  • Content safety checks on every uploaded image.
06

What each one actually fixes

Features are only interesting as answers. Left: the thing that costs a Nigerian service business money this week. Right: the mechanism that addresses it.

“I sell on Instagram and WhatsApp. When I send people to a website, they stop replying.”
The sale happens inside the DM. The assistant shows the product, works out the total with delivery, and collects payment in the same chat — no link out, no checkout page. The vendor still gets what a website would have given them: an order record of who bought what and when, a customer list, and payment held until delivery. The same applies to a salon taking a deposit or an artizan booking a home visit.
“I spend my whole day replying ‘how much?’ instead of running the business.”
The assistant studies the business on its own and answers, sells and upsells from day one. The owner gets a notification when money has landed and something needs delivering — the admin work disappears and only the real work is left.
“They booked and never showed up.”
A deposit on the service turns an intention into a commitment. If they still do not come, the no-show settlement pays the business 80% of the forfeited deposit — the slot is still lost, but it is no longer free to lose.
“I have no idea who came in last month.”
Every walk-in checked in at the front desk creates a customer record. The venue stops being a place where revenue happens and starts being a place where revenue is recorded — which is what makes analytics, review requests and repeat marketing possible at all.
“My Google listing says I close at 6. I have closed at 8 for a year.”
Connected Profile reads Google, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, shows you every place they disagree, and publishes your answer back to Google and WhatsApp. Wrong opening hours are the single most common complaint customers leave about small businesses.
“DMs come in at 11pm and I answer at 9am. By then they have booked elsewhere.”
The assistant answers from a brief it wrote and you approved, and can book the slot or take the order outright. You see exactly which times it would give away, and the precise list of situations where it stops and hands the conversation back.
“December was excellent. February was frightening.”
Membership tiers convert a seasonal business into a subscription one. Entitlements deduct automatically at check-in, so the front desk is never doing mental arithmetic over who has sessions left.
“I cannot let my receptionist see the takings.”
Per-area permissions, not one admin switch. She runs check-ins all day with analytics off. Payouts and branches stay owner-only regardless of what else is granted.
“I meant to ask them to leave a review.”
Check-out sends it automatically, as email and WhatsApp from one authored message. Reviews are what decide the next customer's booking, and this is the step owners reliably never get round to.
“I opened a second branch and lost control of both.”
A venue network: each branch keeps its own address and public page while the whole estate stays visible from one workspace. Staff at one location do not get the keys to the rest.
07

The assistant: a hire that is ready on day one

The single biggest thing ArtizanSquare gives a small business, and one of the main ways we intend to grow. One assistant runs on WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook at once, studies the business by itself, and starts on customer service, closing sales and upselling from the first message.

Setting it up — four steps, no training course
  1. 01

    Connect your channels

    Link WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook from the dashboard. One login per channel, no code.

  2. 02

    It studies the business

    The assistant reads your profile, products or services, prices, stock, delivery areas, hours and past posts, and writes its own business brief. You can read and edit every line of it.

  3. 03

    Pick how much to hand over

    Each job — answering, selling, booking, following up — can be Off, Suggest (you approve each reply) or Auto.

  4. 04

    It starts working

    Customer service, closing sales and upselling from the first message. Type into any chat yourself and it steps aside.

Hiring a person vs switching on the assistant
A new hireThe assistant
Ready to workAfter weeks of training and a probation periodDay one — it studies the business itself
Customers at onceOne conversation at a timeThousands, on WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook together
HoursBusiness hours, minus breaks and leaveEvery hour, including 11pm on a Sunday
On a bad dayTired, short with customers, sometimes rudeNever burns out, never loses patience
CostSalary, healthcare, pension, transportOne pocket-friendly subscription
UpsellingWhen they rememberEvery order, from what is actually in stock

No probation period, no burnout, no salary negotiation, no healthcare bill. One assistant, thousands of customers, one pocket-friendly subscription.

It stays staff, not a replacement for the owner: every job can be Off, Suggest or Auto; every price and total comes from the catalogue rather than the model; discounts only within a limit the owner sets; and the moment the owner types into a conversation, the assistant steps aside.

08

One business, start to finish

A worked example of what a vendor sets up, what they switch on, and what it does for them. The business is illustrative; every step is a real part of the product.

Angelique's Kitchen

A home kitchen in Surulere selling jollof trays, small chops and soup bowls through Instagram and WhatsApp. Ten regular customers, every order taken by hand in the DMs.

  1. 01

    Signs up and chooses “I sell products”

    Only the questions a vendor needs: business name, what they sell, where they deliver.

  2. 02

    Sets up the menu

    Each tray and bowl with a photo, price, portion sizes and what is available today. Delivery areas and fees for Surulere, Yaba and Lekki.

  3. 03

    Links Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Google Business

    Connected Profile pulls in the bio, opening hours, photos and address in about a minute and fixes the places they disagree.

  4. 04

    The assistant sets itself up

    No training. It reads the menu, the profile, the posts and the delivery rules, writes its own business brief, and starts answering customers the same day.

  5. 05

    Adds a bank account

    Where ArtizanSquare remits the money customers pay in the chat, once the order is delivered.

  6. 06

    Every post and comment lands on the dashboard

    Facebook and Instagram posts, their comments and every WhatsApp chat appear in one inbox, already sorted into questions, orders and leads.

  7. 07

    Switches on the ready-made automations

    Abandoned-basket nudge, lead follow-up, after-delivery review request. One tap each, editable later.

  8. 08

    Runs an ad with Comment-to-DM

    Anyone who comments “menu” or “how much” on the ad gets a private message with the menu and a way to order. Included in the subscription, not charged per ad.

  9. 09

    Stops chasing, starts delivering

    The assistant answers, suggests the drink or extra portion, takes the order and collects payment inside the chat. Angelique gets one message: “New order paid — 2 jollof trays to Yaba. Please deliver.”

  10. 10

    Reads the Monday report

    Which dish sold out fastest, which one is worth advertising, the hour customers order most, and what to try next week.

What changed

The money that would have gone on a sales assistant's salary goes into targeted ads instead. Ten regulars become a customer list across three neighbourhoods, and the report shows which new dishes are worth adding to the menu.

See the salon and artizan versions
09

How a business actually scales on it

This is a genuine sequence — each phase depends on the data the previous one produced — so it is numbered. Most venues move through it over months, not days.

01
Day one

Exist properly, for free

Activate the venue and import the Google Business Profile — hours, address, phone, categories and photos arrive in under a minute. Add the service menu with real prices. Get verified, which costs nothing on any plan. Connect WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook and the assistant studies the business on its own. The business now has a page that ranks, takes bookings and orders, and a DM inbox that answers itself — at zero cost and zero risk.

  • Free plan
  • KYC verification
  • Public page live
  • Assistant studying
02
Week one

Stop the leak

Put a deposit on the services that hurt to lose — the two-hour treatment, the Saturday chair. Set up payouts and decide whether to accept payment at the venue. Start checking walk-ins in, so the customer who came through the door without booking finally leaves a record.

  • Deposits on
  • Payouts configured
  • Visit board in use
03
Month one

Let the follow-up run itself

Turn on the after-visit review request and the DM auto-reply. The work that happens after a customer leaves stops depending on the owner remembering. Reviews accumulate, which improves ranking, which brings the next customer — the first compounding loop in the system.

  • Review automation
  • Unified inbox
  • Assistant answering
04
The upgrade moment

Do the arithmetic and move to Growth

This is where the model does its own selling. At Free, the platform keeps 6% of every deposit it moves. On Growth at ₦5,000 a month, that drops to 3%. A venue moving roughly ₦167,000 of deposits a month is already paying the subscription in saved fees alone — and Growth also brings memberships, social automation, campaigns and ten team seats. The upgrade is arithmetic a business can do for itself, which is precisely the point.

  • Deposit fee 6% → 3%
  • Memberships unlocked
  • 10 staff seats
05
Quarter two

Make next month predictable

Launch membership tiers. Money now arrives whether or not the week was busy, and members visit more often because they have already paid. The first ₦100,000 of membership revenue carries no platform share at all, so the experiment itself is free. Staff get their own logins with the right access, and the owner stops being the bottleneck.

  • Recurring revenue
  • Staff permissions
  • Campaigns
06
Year one and beyond

Open the second location

Scale at ₦15,000 a month gives unlimited branches, staff and services, the lowest deposit fee at 1.5%, a custom domain, API access and advanced analytics. Each branch keeps its own page and address; the group is managed from one workspace. The business that arrived as a single chair is now an estate — and the platform's revenue grew with it rather than ahead of it.

  • Deposit fee 1.5%
  • Unlimited branches
  • Custom domain & API
10

Where we are going

The direction is the same one the rest of this page points at: take one more job off the owner's desk.

Advertising, run by the assistant. The assistant already knows which products sell out, which services leave chairs empty and which neighbourhoods order most — it tells the owner every Monday. The next step is for it to act on that: plan, launch and adjust adverts on Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Google and other networks, with the owner approving the budget. Comment-to-DM then turns the people who respond to those ads into orders and bookings in the chat.

This is coming soon and is not live yet. When it is, this brief will say how it is priced before anyone is charged for it.

11

How we make money

Eight revenue lines across two families: recurring subscription, and a share of money the platform actually moves. Written out in full, with the rates, because a business that can see what it will be charged before it signs up is a business that does not get a surprise later.

Line one — subscriptions
PlanMonthlyDeposit feeStaffBranchesAI replies / mo
Company · Free₦06%1150
Company · Growth₦5,0003%1012,000
Company · Scale₦15,0001.5%UnlimitedUnlimited10,000
Artizan · Free₦06%1150
Artizan · Pro₦2,5003%111,000

Annual billing charges ten months for twelve — two months free, and one payment instead of a decision every month.

Trial registration fee

₦100 / $1
Paid by the business

Every paid plan opens with a 14-day trial that takes a one-off, non-refundable ₦100 ($1 outside Nigeria) and saves the card, so the plan continues without interruption when the trial ends. Cancel before then and nothing further is charged. The amount is deliberately nominal — it exists to make the transition automatic, not to be a revenue line.

Deposit remittance fee

6% / 3% / 1.5%
Deducted from the business

The transactional core. A share of each deposit the platform holds and remits, and the rate is what a subscription really buys: a business on Free keeps 94% of every deposit; on Scale it keeps 98.5%. Taking bookings is free. Verification is free. No-show protection is free. What costs money is money we move.

Discovery fee

15%
Deducted from the business

A one-off share of the firstbooking from a customer the platform introduced — floored at ₦500, capped at ₦5,000, and never more than 25% of the job's value so the floor cannot become punitive on small work.

Both conditions are required and neither is guessed: the customer must have come from ArtizanSquare and be new to that business. On a relationship the business built itself, this is zero, and the receipt says so. It is charged exactly once per customer relationship, never on a returning customer.

Convenience fee

₦150
Paid by the customer

A flat charge to the customer for the guaranteed slot a deposit secures. Never deducted from the business's money — it sits on top. High-volume and low-friction, and the one line that grows purely with booking count rather than with basket size.

No-show forfeit share

20%
From the forfeited deposit

When a customer does not turn up and the deposit is forfeited, the business keeps 80% and the platform takes 20%. Earned only in the moment the deposit prevented a total loss — which is the entire justification for taking any of it, and why the settlement screen states every figure before the money moves.

Membership revenue share

3%
Deducted from the business

A share of each membership renewal collected on the business's behalf, capped at ₦2,500 per charge. The first ₦100,000 of membership revenue carries no share at all, so a shop trying memberships for the first time is not billed for the experiment. Charged only on money that actually landed.

Credit bundles

Variable
Paid by the business

Plans include monthly allowances for email, WhatsApp and AI replies. Beyond them, businesses buy top-up bundles — single channel or combo. There is a real cost behind this one: Meta bills per WhatsApp conversation and model usage is metered, so it is closer to resale than margin, but it scales directly with engagement.

Profile boost

Placement
Paid by the business

Paid prominence in search and category listings, available from Growth upward. The classic marketplace advertising line, and the one with the most headroom as listing density grows — it only becomes valuable when there are enough businesses in a category for position to matter.

12

The four rules our pricing cannot break

These are enforced by the billing system itself rather than left to good intentions. They are what make the fee stack defensible to an owner reading a receipt.

Every percentage has a naira cap

No fee is ever an uncapped percentage. The ceiling is part of the calculation itself, so it cannot be forgotten on one code path and applied on another.

Never charged twice for one transaction

When a booking carries a discovery fee, the deposit remittance fee is zero — and the waiver is printed on the receipt rather than silently omitted.

The business keeps at least half of every deposit

Whatever else applies, our total share is capped at 50%. Any fee that cannot be collected inside that ceiling is simply not collected — never carried forward, never deducted later, never pursued.

The free tier is never charged more than a paid one

Checked across the whole plan catalogue automatically. A pricing change that broke this rule would be rejected before it could ever reach a customer.

One thing is deliberately absent from every plan and every price list: verification. It is not sold, at any tier, to either kind of provider. Keeping customers safe from bad actors is our own obligation rather than a feature with a price — and in a market where trust is the binding constraint on booking a stranger, that is a positioning decision as much as an ethical one.

Taking bookings is free. Verification is free. No-show protection is free. What costs money is money we move.

Start on the free tier

Set your venue up, put your services on it, and let the diary, the deposits and the follow-ups run themselves. The free tier does not expire, and verification costs nothing on it.

List your businessFor business ownersSee pricing

Last reviewed September 2026. Every rate on this page is the one our billing system actually applies. If anything here ever disagrees with what you are charged, tell us and we will fix the page or the charge — write to support@artizansquare.com.