Acctbazaar · Digital marketplace
Acctbazaar is a marketplace where merchants sell social media and gaming accounts, gift cards and crypto, and creators sell tickets, courses, eBooks and templates. I designed the merchant and creator sides: listing, delivery, escrowed orders, payouts and verification.
Context
In Nigeria, a lot of digital trade happens in WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels and Instagram DMs. A seller posts an aged Instagram account, a batch of Amazon gift cards or a USDT rate. A buyer messages, sends money by bank transfer, and waits. If the seller disappears, there's nobody to call.
Creators face a quieter version of the same problem. An event organiser sells tickets through one link, a course through another, and an eBook through a third, then chases payment confirmations in their bank app.
Every sale needed one side to go first. Acctbazaar's job was to make sure neither side had to.
Acctbazaar puts both kinds of seller on one marketplace with escrow in the middle. Buyers pay into Acctbazaar, sellers deliver against a timer, and money is released only when the order is confirmed or the timer runs out. My job was to design the two seller experiences, merchant and creator, so that listing, delivering and getting paid felt safe and predictable.
Discovery
The core question: what happens today between "I have something to sell" and "the money is in my account", and where does it go wrong? Discovery ran in four streams: desk research, a review of the products sellers already use, observation of how sellers trade in public marketplaces, and sessions with the Acctbazaar team on goals and support.
Desk research
Two of the platforms Nigerian traders relied on most disappeared within two years. Binance removed naira from its P2P market in February 2024 and ended all naira services in March. Paxful, long a default for peer-to-peer crypto in Nigeria, shut down on 1 November 2025. Both left traders looking for somewhere new to buy and sell USDT for naira.
Account trading had a trust problem of its own. A 2024 study of social media account marketplaces found 38,253 accounts listed across 11 public marketplaces, worth over $64 million. Only a few offered escrow, and underground markets left buyers and sellers to arrange payment between themselves.
On the creator side, Selar showed the demand: about 150,000 creators made over ₦4 billion selling courses, books and tickets in 2023. Creators were clearly willing to sell digital products online, as long as getting paid was simple.
Sellers didn't need more places to post. They needed a place where the money was held fairly until the job was done.
Competitive review
A merchant selling across Acctbazaar's categories would otherwise need a different product for each. I reviewed the leading option in each category, plus their reviews, looking for what to copy and what to avoid.
| Category | Products reviewed | What works | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social media accounts | Accsmarket, FameSwap, Telegram and WhatsApp sellers | Large catalogues, filters by platform and age | Escrow rare or off-platform, crypto-only payment, no naira |
| Gaming accounts and items | G2G, Eldorado.gg, PlayerAuctions | Delivery timers, seller ratings, dispute windows | Built for dollar cards; Nigerian sellers struggle with payouts |
| Crypto P2P | Binance P2P, Paxful, Noones, Bybit P2P | Escrowed trades, payment-method filters, timers | Naira removed or platform closed; trust reset to zero |
| Gift cards | Cardtonic, Prestmit | Fast naira payouts, clear rates | Sell to the platform only; no marketplace between people |
| Creator products | Selar, Tix.africa | Simple storefronts, naira payments, ticketing | Separate from where buyers of other digital goods already shop |
The patterns worth keeping came from gaming and P2P platforms: delivery timers, escrow, dispute windows and ratings. What nobody combined was those protections, naira and dollar payouts, and a catalogue wide enough to bring buyers back.
Seller research
I didn't have direct access to Acctbazaar's customers, so I went to where sellers already do business. I followed public Telegram channels, WhatsApp groups and Instagram pages selling accounts, gift cards, USDT and event tickets, read reviews of competing marketplaces, and filled the gaps with the operations and support team, who spoke to sellers every day. Five questions guided what I looked for:
Stakeholder research
Support load
| Request | Root cause | Design response |
|---|---|---|
| "The buyer says the login doesn't work" | Credentials shared in chat with no record | Structured credential fields with 2FA, stored on the order and shown to the buyer only after payment |
| "When do I get my money?" | No clear moment when an order counts as done | Manual or auto release chosen per listing, a visible timer, and "Amount in escrow" on the wallet |
| "Why was my listing rejected?" | Admin review with no feedback loop | Pending, Active, Paused and Rejected states on every ad, with a dedicated rejected view |
| "I sent crypto to the wrong network" | Withdrawal address with no network check | Network picker with estimated arrival time and a mismatch warning |
Synthesis
Target audience
Two composite personas drawn from the seller research and the support team's experience, one for each seller profile. When a decision was unclear, we asked which of them it would help.
Runs three WhatsApp groups and a Telegram channel. Makes 20 to 40 sales a week and handles every one by hand.
Pain points
Sells tickets for four events a year, a course and a template pack. Each lives on a different tool.
Pain points
The design
Merchants and creators share one account, one wallet and one way of handling orders. What they sell, and how they list it, is different. The design follows both from sign-up to their first payout.
Sign up
Sign-up ends with one question: how do you plan to use Acctbazaar? Customer, Merchant or Creator. The choice only sets where you land first. Anyone can switch profiles from the account menu later, so a buyer can start selling without creating a second account.
Merchant onboarding
New merchants first see why to sell here: global reach, promotion, support that keeps refunds to 0.5% of sales, and payouts in naira or USD. Then three steps: a one-time $30 fee (₦50,000), a listing, and a plan. The fee is a deliberate filter that keeps spam sellers out, so it's stated plainly and accepted by bank transfer, card or crypto.
Listing
Every listing follows four steps: product type, details, credentials and preview. Merchants choose manual release, confirming each order themselves, or auto release, where the system hands over the product after a set time. They also commit to a delivery time, from 5 minutes up, which buyers see as "Delivers in 5 mins" on every order.
Credentials go into structured fields, including the 2FA email and password, so they're stored on the order rather than pasted into chat.
Crypto P2P
Crypto ads follow the same listing flow, with a payment details step for up to five payment methods and optional trading terms. Orders show token, customer, the naira and crypto amount side by side, payment method and status, so a trader can scan a day's trades in one table.
Orders
Every order shows a countdown, the delivered credentials and the chat with the buyer side by side. The buyer checks the product before the timer ends. If something is wrong, they open a dispute from the same screen. If not, the order completes, money moves out of escrow, and both sides leave a rating.
Each ad keeps its own order history, so a merchant can see exactly who bought what, and when.
Creator's Centre
Creators get their own space with the same dashboard as merchants: total earned, products sold, payments and a sales chart. Setup starts with a short profile (photo, display name, bio), then four product types, each with its own upload flow.
Tickets
Tickets follow the same four-step pattern as merchant listings, adapted for events: name, description, location or a virtual toggle, category and banner, then ticket tiers with their own prices and quantities. Each event's detail page shows ticket types next to the buyer list, so organisers stop matching bank alerts to names.
Digital delivery
For courses and eBooks, the file is attached to the order itself. The buyer downloads and checks it before the timer ends, with the chat next to it if anything fails. The same escrow and dispute rules apply, so creators are protected in the same way as merchants.
Wallet
The wallet splits money into total, trading, funding and the amount held in escrow, so sellers always know what's theirs to withdraw. Withdrawals go to a bank account or a crypto address. Crypto withdrawals ask for the network first, show the estimated arrival time, and warn if the address might not match, before the PIN is entered.
Verification
A "Become verified" prompt sits at the bottom of every seller screen. KYC runs in four steps (personal info, address, ID and business documents), and verified sellers get a badge buyers can see. It's optional at sign-up so the first listing isn't blocked, but it's always one click away.
Outcome and reflection
Before Acctbazaar, these sales happened in DMs with no escrow, no timer and no record. Putting both seller types on one set of foundations (listing, escrowed orders, chat and wallet) meant each new category was a new form, not a new product.
Looking back, the creator flows reused the merchant patterns closely, which made them fast to build. Creators think in events and audiences rather than inventory, though, so the next step is creator-specific tools such as attendee check-in, course progress and discount codes. Dispute resolution is the other big opportunity: today it ends in a support conversation, and clearer evidence and outcomes on the order itself would resolve more cases without one.
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