Zoobashop

Ghanaian online retail store

Epitaph

“Here lies Zoobashop. One of Ghana's first home-grown online stores, it sold electronics and appliances on delivery from 2013 and won the marketing institute's e-commerce award twice. The storefront was quietly decommissioned in 2022. Someone still pays the rent on the empty shop.”

Overview

Born: 2013 (Year)
Died: January 2022 (Month)
Lifespan: 9 years
Fate: Dormant
Headquarters: 🇬🇭 Ghana
Category: E-commerce & Retail
Primary cause: Unknown

Death certificate

Timeline

5 December 2013Zoobashop launches
CEO Albert Biga unveils the store at Marina Mall in Accra with more than 3,000 products and cash-on-delivery payment
October 2016Second CIMG win
Zoobashop is named CIMG E-Commerce Company of the Year for the second year running
30 November 2018Ghana E-Commerce Awards
Zoobashop is among the winners at the Alisa Hotel ceremony alongside Melcom Online and Flutterwave
November 2019Sixth anniversary
The company marks six years of online retailing with flash sales and a Jaara Festival promotion running to 6 December 2019

Autopsy report

Why did Zoobashop shut down?

Zoobashop.com was one of Ghana's first significant home-grown online retailers, launched in Accra in December 2013 under chief executive Albert Biga. It sold electronics, phones, appliances, fashion and household goods with nationwide delivery and cash on delivery, won the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Ghana's e-commerce award in consecutive years, and marked six years of trading in November 2019. No source was found announcing a closure or reporting a wind-down, and no company activity after 2019 was found either.

What Zoobashop attempted

An all-inclusive online marketplace for West Africa, opened at a launch event at Accra's Marina Mall on 5 December 2013 with more than 3,000 products across electronics and computers, mobile phones and tablets, wines and spirits, baby and toddler goods and fashion accessories, carrying brands including Apple, BlackBerry, Samsung, Colgate, Paco Rabanne and Beko. It accepted Visa and MasterCard as well as cash on delivery, a payment option it treated as its main differentiator in a low-trust market, and ran door-to-door delivery across Ghana from Accra out to Wa and Aflao. By 2019 its range was described as kitchen and home appliances, phones and tablets, clothes and television and home theatre sets, sold through flash sales and seasonal promotions such as its Jaara Festival event.

What worked

Zoobashop was named CIMG E-Commerce Company of the Year by the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Ghana for two consecutive years, with the second win announced in October 2016; a later Joy Business piece dates the two wins to 2015 and 2016. In November 2018 it was among the winners at the Ghana E-Commerce Awards in Accra alongside Melcom Online, Flutterwave, Tonaton, Pizarea, Africakart, Aramex, DHL Express, Jumia Food and Alisa Hotels. By its sixth anniversary in November 2019 Joy Business described it as a household name in Ghana's e-commerce market.

What happened

The storefront was decommissioned while the domain name was deliberately kept alive. zoobashop.com does still exist in DNS, but only as a dangling alias: it returns a CNAME to d3luewqhbsu0jr.cloudfront.net, and that CloudFront distribution itself has no address record (Google Public DNS, 2 August 2026), so nothing is served. WHOIS shows the domain created 3 September 2013, last updated 5 August 2025 and paid through to 3 September 2027 at Domain.com/Network Solutions on ns1/ns2.ipage.com: someone is still renewing it. The Internet Archive's last successful capture of zoobashop.com is 22 January 2022 (HTTP 200); availability queries anchored at June 2022, June 2023, June 2024 and January 2026 all return that same January 2022 snapshot, so the site has not returned a working page to the crawler in more than four years.

Lessons for future builders

Being first and winning the awards buys a reputation that outlasts the business by years. Zoobashop's storefront was decommissioned quietly while someone kept renewing the domain, which is what it looks like when a company stops without anyone deciding to stop it.