Your Website Isn't a Shop. Stop Treating It Like One.

Find a location. Set it up. Open the doors. Wait for people to walk in.

It makes sense, because that's the only model most business owners have ever known. You get a shop, you stock it, and then business happens to you, someone walks past, sees the signage, comes in. The shop itself doesn't do anything. It just has to exist in the right place, and existing is enough.

So when the same owner builds a website, they carry that logic over without noticing. Get a domain. Put up the pages. Now it's live and technically open for business. And then, without really deciding to, they start waiting. For someone to type in the web address. For Google to send traffic. For the phone to ring because the website is "out there somewhere."

I worked with a client last year, he had professionally built site, good photos, clean layout. But he contacted us three months after launch, slightly frustrated with his previous developer, asking why the website "wasn't bringing customers." I asked him how many times he'd shared the link. He paused. He hadn't, really. It was in his Instagram bio. That was it.

The website wasn't broken. Nobody was taking it anywhere.

That conversation stayed with me, because it wasn't really about marketing. It was about a wrong mental model. He wasn't failing to promote a tool. He was waiting outside a shop that happened to be online.

Here's the truth: a shop has a legitimate reason to wait. It's bolted to a location. It can't go to the customer, the customer has to come to it. That's not a flaw in the shop, it's just physics. Four walls and a roof don't move.

A website has no such excuse. It isn't bolted to anything. It can be pasted into a WhatsApp message before a customer even finishes asking "do you have this in stock?" It can sit quietly behind a Google search for someone who has never heard your business name and never will hear it any other way. It can travel in an invoice, in an email signature, in a voice note reply, into a customer's phone in Kano while your shop is in Lagos. None of that requires the customer to come looking. It requires you to send it.

Most businesses never use that difference. They built something that can move, and then they parked it.

I think this happens because a website doesn't feel like it needs tending the way a shop does. Nobody has to sweep it, restock it, or open its doors each morning. It just sits on a server, technically working, technically available and that stillness gets mistaken for completeness. The site is "done." But done and working aren't the same thing. A shop with the lights off in a street nobody walks down is also, technically, open.

What follows from this, if it's true, isn't really about redesigning anything. My client didn't need a new website, he never needed to switch developers. He needed to stop treating the website he had like a building and start treating it like something with legs, something you hand to people rather than something you hope people find.

I could be wrong, but I think most SME websites in Nigeria aren't underperforming because they're poorly built. They're underperforming because they're being run like shops, by owners who already, instinctively, know how to run a shop and nobody told them the rules don't transfer.