Across many African university campuses, the student economy is disrupted, inefficient, and often unsafe. Students seeking affordable textbooks, services, or daily essentials face a maze of informal channels on social media where scams, inflated prices, and unreliable sellers are common.
Meanwhile, student entrepreneurs struggle to reach customers, build credibility, and manage sales professionally. The result is a disjointed campus economy where potential income, learning, and community value circulation are lost.
In this edition of Techparley’s Drive100, we center our attention to Alutamarket, a Nigerian startup transforming campus economies into safe, unified, and thriving digital marketplaces.
As the founder of Alutamarket notes, “buyers struggle to find affordable textbooks, services, and everyday items, often resorting to risky, informal marketplaces on social media, while student entrepreneurs lack a centralized platform to reach a large customer base and manage their sales professionally.”
Founded by Falade Jerome, Alutamarket is a multi-vendor platform designed specifically for university students. It brings buyers and sellers together in a secure, transparent, and efficient ecosystem, creating a professional and trustworthy campus economy.
Jerome explains, “Alutamarket is the only platform that unifies the campus economy into a single, trusted, and efficient digital marketplace, empowering student entrepreneurs and providing buyers with a safe, affordable, and convenient shopping experience backed by the spirit of community solidarity.”
What You Should Know About Alutamarket
Alutamarket is more than just a marketplace, it is a solution built by students, for students, grounded in firsthand experience of campus life and economic friction.
It addresses a dual problem: helping buyers find goods safely and affordably, while enabling student sellers to access a professional, scalable sales channel.
For Buyers: The platform solves high costs, difficulty locating items, the risk of scams, and unreliable informal sellers.
For Sellers: It tackles limited market reach, struggles to build customer trust, and the logistical challenges of managing payments and orders manually.
For the Campus Community: By creating a centralized marketplace, Alutamarket keeps economic value circulating on campus, strengthens local entrepreneurship, and fosters a safer, more collaborative student ecosystem.
By addressing these core pain points, Alutamarket positions itself as the go-to solution for campus commerce, transforming fragmented micro-economies into a professional, inclusive marketplace that fosters financial empowerment.
How Alutamarket Operates: Key Features and Benefits
Alutamarket’s platform combines technology, security, and user-centered design to bring convenience, trust, and efficiency to every campus transaction.
Multi-Vendor Storefronts: Every student can create a customizable online shop at no cost, gaining instant access to the entire campus market.
This not only gives visibility but also helps sellers establish credibility and professionalism.
Integrated Secure Payments: Powered by Paystack, the platform supports secure checkout and dedicated virtual accounts (DVAs) for sellers, eliminating fraud risks and simplifying financial management.
This ensures that sellers receive funds promptly and reliably.
Real-Time Messaging and Notifications: In-app communication allows buyers and sellers to negotiate and clarify orders, while push, email, and SMS notifications ensure everyone stays updated on order progress.
AI-Powered Agents: Using Genkit AI, Alutamarket automates key processes like order tracking, secure bank account verification for payouts, and intelligent checkout flows, reducing friction and enhancing user experience.
Logistics and Order Management: A centralized dashboard enables sellers to manage products, track orders, monitor performance, and analyze sales data, reducing operational stress and enabling data-driven decision-making.
Jerome emphasizes, “We built a system that guarantees trust in a historically low-trust environment, ensuring both buyers and sellers are protected.”
These features reflect a design philosophy that blends technology, community, and practicality, ensuring the platform is useful, reliable, and tailored to campus realities.
Alutamarket: Traction, Progress and Milestones
Despite being in the early stages, Alutamarket has achieved notable traction and set meaningful milestones:
- A production-ready, full-featured platform is live, including a buyer-facing marketplace, a seller dashboard, and a super-admin panel.
- Strategic partnerships have been secured to support logistics, payments, and campus operations.
- The platform is actively onboarding sellers and buyers at the Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA), with full operations scheduled to commence with campus resumption late November 2025.
- Short-term targets include 500 active users and over 1,000 successful transactions within the first 6–12 months.
These early prelaunch achievements demonstrate that Alutamarket is not just a concept but a functioning platform with measurable outputs, showing that trust, efficiency, and community can co-exist in a student-led digital marketplace.
Meeting with the Team Behind Alutamarket
Alutamarket is powered by a lean, agile, and highly specialized team, combining lived campus experience with technical and marketing expertise.
Falade Jerome (Founder & CEO): Jerome brings first-hand experience of the campus economy, driving product vision, strategy, and community engagement.
Ayinde Samuel (CTO): Full-stack developer responsible for platform development and AI integration, ensuring scalability and reliability.
Dada Tolulope (CMO): Experienced in fintech and EdTech marketing, responsible for user engagement and market positioning.
Obatuyi Funke (CCO): Oversees communications, building trust and awareness among students and stakeholders.
The combination of personal experience, technical knowledge, and market insight ensures that the team can tackle the unique challenges of campus commerce and deliver a product that resonates with both buyers and sellers.
Challenges and How Alutamarket is Overcoming Them
Alutamarket has faced two major operational challenges:
Building Trust in a Low-Trust Environment: Informal social media marketplaces are often plagued by scams.
Alutamarket is overcoming this through secure, escrow-like payments and transparent order tracking, protecting both buyers and sellers while building credibility for student entrepreneurs.
Simplifying Logistics: Managing orders, deliveries, and pickups across campus can be complex.
The team designed on-campus pickup stations and home delivery workflows, integrated into a unified dashboard for sellers, to reduce operational headaches and ensure timely deliveries.
By proactively addressing these hurdles, Alutamarket demonstrates pragmatic problem-solving and user-centered innovation, ensuring that its marketplace is both safe and efficient.
The Road Ahead: Post launching Visions and Future Expansion Plans of Alutamarket
Alutamarket’s vision is both ambitious and strategic.
Next 6–12 Months: Establish itself as the dominant, trusted commerce platform at FUTA; onboard 500+ active users; complete 1,000+ transactions; refine logistics and user experience.
Next 2–3 Years: Expand to 5–10 major Nigerian campuses; introduce AI-driven features like personalized recommendations and proactive fraud detection to enhance safety and convenience.
Next 5 Years: Scale to universities across Africa, and becoming the definitive economic layer for the student population and integrating broader student-centric financial services.
Talking Points
Alutamarket addresses a clear and pressing problem in campus economies by providing a secure, student-focused marketplace that combines technology, trust, and community.
Its strengths include a founder with firsthand experience of campus challenges, AI-powered features, secure payments, and tools that empower student entrepreneurs. These differentiate it from informal marketplaces and larger, impersonal platforms.
However, as an early-stage startup, it faces challenges in scaling operations, building trust beyond its pilot campus, and maintaining consistent execution of its AI and payment systems.
Success will depend on careful user engagement, logistical management, and phased expansion, but its concept is highly relevant and has strong potential to transform student commerce if executed strategically.
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