Building Kennyscent taught me that the standard e-commerce funnel is sometimes the thing standing between a business and its sales.
The default answer for an online shop is a cart, a checkout, and a payment gateway. For Kennyscent, a registered perfume and gifting business in Surulere, that answer would have lost sales rather than made them.
The business already had a working sales channel
Almost every order was already arriving through WhatsApp. Customers asked whether a scent was in stock, sent a photo of a gift box they wanted recreated, negotiated delivery to their part of Lagos, and paid by transfer. That conversation is not friction to be removed, it is where the actual selling happens, especially for gift packages that are half-custom by nature.
Dropping a checkout in front of that would have replaced a channel with a 100 percent close rate with one that asks a first-time buyer to enter card details on a site they have never heard of.
So the site's job changed
Instead of converting to a payment, the site converts to a conversation with context already attached. Every product page has an order button that opens WhatsApp with the product name and reference pre-filled, so the message arrives knowing what it is about. The catalog, collections, and live search exist to let someone browse properly before they ever type a word.
- Catalog and search do the browsing work a chat cannot
- The order button carries product context into the message
- No account, no cart, no abandoned checkout to chase
- High-value or custom orders route to a human, which is where they were always going to end up
The general lesson
Build for the channel the customer already trusts. A technically complete checkout that nobody uses is worth less than a well-made catalog that feeds a channel already closing sales. The interesting engineering was not payment integration, it was making the browse experience good enough that the conversation starts warm.