Onboarding is not a formality: it is the minimum setup your assistant needs before it can take a real order and get you paid. Four things, in this order, and you are live.
1. Business profile
Your assistant introduces your business to every new customer who messages it, so the first step is telling Lameda who you are: your business name, what you sell, your delivery or pickup situation, and your operating hours. This is not decoration. Customers will ask your assistant things like “do you deliver to Abuja” or “are you open on Sunday,” and it can only answer accurately from what you have told it.
2. Your first products
Add a handful of real products to your Catalogue before you go further: photos, prices, and short descriptions. You do not need your entire inventory listed on day one. A working catalogue of 5 to 10 items is enough to test the full flow: a customer browsing, picking, and paying.
3. Connect a channel
Pick the chat app where your customers already are, whether that is Telegram, WhatsApp, or Instagram, and connect it. You can add the other two later; there is no requirement to launch on all three at once. Most merchants start with whichever channel already has an audience, then expand once the first one is running smoothly.
4. Payment setup
Lameda verifies customer payments automatically through Paystack, which means this step is what turns “a customer said they paid” into “the payment is confirmed and the order is real.” Get this connected before you share your store link publicly. Without it, orders can come in but payment confirmation will not happen automatically.
How you will know you are done
Onboarding is complete when you can send your assistant a test message on your connected channel, get a sensible answer back, browse a product, and see what a checkout looks like end to end. If any part of that breaks, whether the assistant does not know your hours, a product has no price, or payment does not confirm, that is the piece still missing.
- Business profile filled in, including hours and delivery information
- At least a few products live in your Catalogue with prices set
- One channel connected and responding to messages
- Payment setup connected so orders can be verified automatically
Once these four are done, move on to your first 14 days: the goal for that stretch is one complete, real, verified order, not a perfect catalogue.