- ₦250,000+spent by one first-time buyer who found Hingees through ChatGPT
The order
Hingees sells leather goods and clothing. First-time buyers usually start small, with a shirt or maybe a notebook. So when a new customer placed a leather goods order of over ₦250,000, it looked like it might be fraud, and someone from the team called to confirm.
The order was real. The customer explained she had not found Hingees through Instagram ads, Google search or a friend. She had asked ChatGPT for Nigerian leather brands, and Hingees showed up.
“I always thought large orders came from returning customers or ads, and they still do. I just never imagined a chatbot would also be bringing us customers.”
The groundwork behind it
Founder Hammed Okunade describes Hingees as obsessive about clean metadata, tagged photos and smart keywords, work it did for years to show up in Google. TechCabal's point is that AI assistants now squeeze research, comparison and the decision into one conversation, and that groundwork is what they can read.
The article argues that a small brand with good product data and images can appear next to bigger brands without paying for ads, while sellers who only use Instagram or WhatsApp risk being invisible to AI tools.
What other stores can take from this
- Clean product details keep paying off. Okunade spent years on tidy metadata, tagged photos and keywords, the kind of information TechCabal says AI tools can read.
- Small brands can appear next to big ones. TechCabal argues good product data and images can get a small store recommended without paying for ads.
- Find out how new buyers found you. Hingees only learned about ChatGPT because the customer mentioned it on the confirmation call.
Worth knowing: This is a single order. It shows what can happen, not what usually happens.
Source
“Small businesses spent years optimising for Google. ChatGPT turned that into sales”
Read the original article (opens in a new tab)Hingees is not a GEO customer. This page is our summary of TechCabal's reporting. The figures and quotes are theirs.
