Click to watchBefore he had 50 stores on his platform, before hotels started buying his retail system for their bars, before he turned down a multi-million naira vending machine contract he couldn’t afford to build yet, Awesome Goodman made a choice that would define everything: he picked principle over profit.
That choice became RetailBox. At first glance, it looks like a point-of-sale tool, but it’s closer to a backbone for stores: tracking every sale, keeping stock in order, flagging when supplies run low, and giving owners a clear view of their business. For some, it’s just a cash register with receipts; for others, it quietly runs the whole back office.
Goodman was already building custom software when a store owner from northern Nigeria asked for a one-off POS system. He could have delivered exactly that and walked away with a steady income. Instead, he told the client no.
“I would not build you your platform because I like being transparent,” Goodman recalls. “If I build it as a one-off, you’ll be locked in. But if I make it part of something bigger, you and others can grow with it.”
That insistence on scale is what shaped RetailBox. It sits in the same space as tools like Bumpa—popular among merchants for blending payments, inventory, and online sales—but its focus is sharper: making physical stores run seamlessly, from the till to the storeroom.
A small pilot
Six months into building what he thought was strictly retail software for shops and supermarkets, Goodman noticed something unusual in his analytics: one of his largest transaction volumes was coming from a hotel.
In hospitality, sales tools were usually split—hotels had reservation and property management systems on one side, then a patchwork of cash registers or bar tabs on the other. Retail-style software wasn’t part of the playbook. Yet here was a hotel using RetailBox to run its lounges and bars like mini stores, tracking every bottle and sale in real time.
Curious, Goodman tested the idea with another hotel owner he knew. The fit was immediate. That second installation is still running today. The experience forced him to broaden the product roadmap, weaving hospitality into RetailBox—a sector that hadn’t even made it into the original business plan.
At ₦100,000 ($67) per year, RetailBox costs less than what most competitors charge monthly. Goodman knows he’s leaving money on the table, but he can afford to do so because of a partnership with the German development organisation GIZ, which connected RetailBox with cloud provider VonTech.
This resulted in zero operational costs for at least two years. If they make ₦100, they keep ₦100.
The aggressive pricing strategy hit a wall when Goodman visited a small food vendor in his estate. His pitch about multi-location management and advanced analytics fell flat. The vendor cut him off: he just wanted to track what he was selling. Nothing more.
Nigerian SMEs don’t want feature-rich complexity—they want reliability that works when the power goes out, which happens more often than most software assumes. Goodman learned that impressive technical capabilities mean nothing if they solve problems customers don’t have.
The bigger picture
Before RetailBox existed, Goodman was building vending machines from scratch. Not importing them—actually manufacturing them, complete with software that could tell you when someone bought a drink in Abuja from your phone in Lagos. The project taught him everything he uses now: JavaScript, Python, APIs, and C programming for hardware interfaces.
Now, with RetailBox gaining traction, the vending machine opportunity is circling back. A Victoria Island company wants him to supply vending machines for high-rise buildings; however, vending machines are not cheap. They require upfront manufacturing capital.
Since launching in February 2025, RetailBox has onboarded 50 stores, with additional branches pushing the total locations higher. Fewer than 10 are currently paying customers since most are still in their one-month free trial. The growth targets are intentionally conservative: 100 stores this year, 500 next year, then 1,000.
Goodman’s approach runs counter to typical startup thinking about rapid scaling. He doesn’t want to suddenly oversee a million-naira revenue operation because growth requires experience he’s still building. Better to learn a smaller scale than fail at a larger scale.
Building technology for Nigerian businesses means solving problems that don’t exist elsewhere. Power outages, inconsistent internet, suspicious customers, and price sensitivity create constraints that force different kinds of innovation. RetailBox works offline and syncs when connectivity returns. Users can operate from phones, tablets, or computers interchangeably. When the power goes out—which it will—business continues.
The customer loyalty program includes fraud prevention because people will split purchases into multiple transactions to game the points system. Staff access controls include detailed activity logs because small businesses require verification. Google Maps integration isn’t just convenience—it’s necessary in a city where addresses are suggestions and landmarks are the primary navigation method. To adopt a leaner approach, the company later replaced Google Maps with a free and open source technology called OpenStreetMap.
What’s actually happening here
Search on Google, and RetailBox doesn’t appear on the first page. Two competitors—retailer.ai and retailer.io—dominate the results. Goodman acknowledges the SEO problem but isn’t worried. The real competition isn’t happening in search results. It’s in the lived experience of Nigerian store owners who need systems that actually work.
Every retailer gets an automatic e-commerce storefront showing real-time inventory and store hours via Google Maps integration. The APIs are open-source, letting developers integrate payment providers or build custom features. But RetailBox’s defining characteristic isn’t technical—it’s philosophical.
In a market where software vendors often oversell and underdeliver, Goodman’s approach of underpromising and overdelivering stands out. The transparency extends to funding.
“It’s a thing of convenience, not necessity,” he says about potential funding. The statement applies equally to his product philosophy: make retail technology so accessible and reliable that not using it becomes the harder choice.
RetailBox is bootstrapped by choice. The company is mulling plans to raise $100,000 to accelerate marketing beyond current word-of-mouth efforts.
Goodman’s electrical engineering background and vending machine prototypes position RetailBox for hardware expansion within two years. The goal is local vending machine manufacturing for a market that currently sees them only in airports. The hardware isn’t separate from software—it’s the logical extension. Every vending machine would run on RetailBox’s platform, managed through the same interface that store owners already know.
RetailBox represents something specific about building technology in Nigeria: solving real problems within actual constraints rather than ideal conditions. Goodman didn’t set out to revolutionise retail—he wanted to solve one client’s problem honestly. That transparency continues to define the company.
In a continent where technology adoption often means forcing foreign solutions into local contexts, RetailBox was built from the ground up for Nigerian realities. The software works not despite local conditions, but because of them. The hotels using retail software for bars, the food vendors who just want inventory tracking, the potential vending machine contracts—none of it was planned. All of it makes sense now.
Click to watch
