Somewhere in Lagos in late 2025, a food vendor named Corporate Ewa, a brand customers loved and trusted, decided to order food from her own restaurant. Not to eat but to investigate.
She had been getting complaints for months. Food that tasted wrong. Packaging was off. Quality that had dropped. What is shocking is that Corporate Ewa had never registered on Glovo. She had never listed a single item. Yet Corporate Ewa was fully live, with her menu and photos from her Instagram page. She decided to place an order.
When the Glovo delivery rider arrived, he told her the food had been picked up from somewhere near Ojuelegba. No kitchen name. Just a pickup point used for multiple alias restaurant brands on the app. She reported it. Glovo told her the listing was legitimate. In October, She sent a Pre-Action letter from her Lawyer to Glovo. The listing stayed up. She went public on X in December and then everyone had a story. One customer, Adenike Ruth, said she took two days off work after a meal she thought came from Corporate Ewa left her nearly hospitalized.
Techpoint Africa decided to run their own experiment. They impersonated a restaurant on both Glovo and Chowdeck using a forged CAC document, fake tax ID, stolen photos and a wrong address. Within 48 hours, they were live and making sales. The KYC wasn’t properly verified.
Even though Chowdeck flagged the fake CAC document, the registration still went through with 100k withdrawal limit cap on the unverified vendor account.
This Is Not a Fraud Story. It Is a Product Story.
Glovo’s and Chowdeck’s onboarding worked exactly as designed; optimized for speed, built to get vendors live as fast as possible. However, a key question that every product team should be asking before they ship is:
What can go wrong? Not in terms of bugs or failed processes but what if the pertinent risks of our designed processes are working as intended.
When you build a marketplace, you are not just a technology company. You are a trust infrastructure. Your product is not the app it is the promise that the food a customer orders will come from the brand they recognize, cooked in that brand's kitchen. The moment you cannot guarantee that, the product’s ability to fulfill its core objective comes into question.
The Pattern Hiding in Plain Sight
This is not a Glovo problem. This is not a Chowdeck problem.
This is a product governance problem and it shows up across African tech in different costumes:
These symptoms points to the very familiar cycle of startups raising or eyeing VC funding and the focus becomes GROWTH AS THE NORTH STAR. Product governance becomes an afterthought. Product teams find themselves making tradeoffs that eventually erode the intrinsic value that the product was meant to deliver.
And the tradeoff that consistently gets made is verification because building fast in an emerging market is genuinely hard, regulatory data is thin, and competition for attention is brutal. That tradeoff is getting expensive.
Four Questions Your Product Team Is Probably Not Asking
1. What can go wrong if this works exactly as designed? Not if something breaks, if it works perfectly. This is a product design question, not a security question. It belongs in your discovery process, not your post-mortem.
2. Who actually bears the risk when something goes wrong? In most Nigerian platform businesses, the answer is: not the platform. The vendor loses its reputation. The customer loses money, or worse their health. The platform loses a news cycle and issues a statement. If the organization is constantly catching up instead of staying ahead, that is not governance. It is a liability waiting to mature.
3. What costs more: building trust or repairing distrust? A proper vendor verification system costs a fraction of one scandal, one lawsuit, one customer who ordered food and received something dangerous. The Corporate Ewa and Techpoint experiment does not require advanced technology to prevent it. It requires a decision. The CAC register and the NRS TIN portal are both publicly accessible with no special access required. Liveness and geolocation checks also exist. Someone simply chose not to check.
4. Are customer complaints feeding back into product decisions? Corporate Ewa reported her issue in August. Her lawyer wrote in October. She went viral in December. Four months of clear signal was ignored. For every vendor who goes viral, dozens are swallowing the same problem quietly. Your support tickets, your customer reviews, your DMs, these are your product's feedback loop. If they are not informing roadmap decisions, you are flying blind and calling it focus.
What This Means If You Are Building Something
The back door in your product is probably not a hacker exploiting a bug. It is more likely a design decision made in a sprint that nobody went back to revisit. A verification step scoped out to protect conversion rates. A governance question was parked because there was a deadline. A complaint that went into a support queue and never made it to a product decision.
Those decisions are still sitting in your product right now.
The question is not whether your product has gaps. Every product does. The question is whether you find them before someone else does.
If you're not sure where your gaps are, that's exactly the kind of conversation we have with teams every week
Book a discovery call with the ProduqtEdge → We will find the gap before the internet does.
