Shopnaw

Ghanaian online marketplace and delivery service

Epitaph

“Here lies Shopnaw. It put groceries, market goods, pharmacy items and restaurant meals in one Ghanaian marketplace and sent personal shoppers to the door. Its four apps stopped updating in August 2021 and were pulled from the store. Nobody came to collect the last order.”

Overview

Born: 2019 (Year)
Died: August 2021 (Month)
Lifespan: 3 years
Fate: Dormant
Headquarters: 🇬🇭 Ghana
Category: E-commerce & Retail, Quick Commerce
Primary cause: Unknown

Death certificate

Timeline

November 2019Launch announced
Citi Newsroom reports the yet-to-be-unveiled Shopnaw marketplace, founded and led by Benjamin Osei Asante

Autopsy report

Why did Shopnaw shut down?

Shopnaw was a Ghanaian online marketplace founded by CEO Benjamin Osei Asante and announced in November 2019, ahead of a planned launch. It aggregated groceries, restaurant meals, local market goods, Made-in-Ghana products, pharmacy items and fashion, and used personal shoppers to deliver to buyers' homes. No later coverage of the company was found, and no source reports how or when it ended.

What Shopnaw attempted

A marketplace connecting retailers, manufacturers, wholesalers and brands to consumer and business buyers, with free sign-up for buyers and sellers, no commission on seller transactions and no price mark-ups. Sellers were to be paid upfront on pickup. It offered a 'plug and play' service for supermarkets, restaurants, pharmacies and local markets, plus advertising products for businesses and a personal-shopper delivery layer.

What worked

Coverage in Citi Newsroom at launch, in which founder Benjamin Osei Asante described the model as complementing rather than competing with sellers.

What happened

Shopnaw shipped a four-app Android suite: Shopnaw - Ride, Food, Delivery (com.shopnaw.user), Shopnaw Seller (com.shopnaw.seller), Shopnaw Provider (com.shopnaw.delivery) and Shopnaw Kiosk (com.shopnaw.kiosk). Its APKPure version history runs v1.1 on 1 January 2020 through v1.8 on 7 August 2021 and then stops. Every one of those package IDs now returns HTTP 404 on Google Play, i.e. all four listings have been removed (a control fetch of com.whatsapp on the same path returns a live listing, so the 404s are real delistings, not a fetch artefact). shopnaw.com no longer serves: it fails with a Cloudflare HTTP 520 origin error in August 2026.

Lessons for future builders

Shipping four apps (buyer, seller, courier, kiosk) before proving anyone wanted the first spreads a small team across four products' worth of bugs. Personal shoppers make the early orders delightful and the unit economics impossible.