Jumia is the largest online shopping mall where over 700,000 weekly visitors buy everything from fashion to electronic products. With over 50,000 different products in stock across over 30 categories, Jumia offers customers the widest assortment at the most affordable prices.

Jumia is also working to build their differentiated offering by assembling a fleet of motorbikes that can easily navigate the congested roads and provide delivery to the consumer. If consumers remain apprehensive about the safety of the mobile shopping experience, the motorbike system allows the consumer to pay cash on delivery.

Jumia was creating their online offering, they had to be aware of the limitations that existed in this space across Nigeria. Internet penetration remains limited in Africa, which poses a significant issue for an e-commerce retailer. While rates are slowly climbing, they are growing strongest in the mobile space. As a result, Jumia has put a specific focus on building out their mobile capabilities, with their entire product catalogue currently available to smartphone users. According to the Nigerian Communication Commission data, roughly 120 million members of the population are mobile subscribers and 48 million are smart phone users (Lomas). On the other side, fiber optic cable linking West Africa and Europe was just being laid in 2013 (Owolawi). While growth of this traditional infrastructure would continue, the key to this market was the mobile consumer. Given that the local infrastructure can be extremely unreliable and unavailable, the stability and accessibility of mobile networks means that the number of subscribers will only continue to grow. Given their strategy, Jumia is well positioned to capitalize on the growing access of these consumers.

Looking forward, as the Nigerian consumer gains trust in Jumia and online retailing, the company will be able to further break down the barriers to purchase. Ultimately, they will be able to remove the cash on delivery component of their business, which will improve processing efficiency and profitability. In addition, as Nigeria continues to grow and infrastructure improves, the company’s ability to deliver products efficiently will continue to improve as well. The critical refinements necessary for Jumia to maintain their current position and continue to pursue their goal of market domination will be based on speed and usability of the platform as demand for mobile phones and mobile shopping continues to grow.

Let’s not mistake what Jumia’s business model is, they want to be the Amazon of Africa. The main similarities between Jumia and Amazon lay in Amazon’s core business, its online-retail business. The online-retail businesses of both companies offer customers the ability to purchase almost anything imaginable through the use of desktop or mobile solutions. The main goal of both Amazon and Jumia is the same; provide an easy-to-use, intuitive, and trusting experience for customers to purchase goods at a low price from anywhere. Some of the major categories of goods are electronics, books, entertainment, clothing, and sporting goods. Beyond these major categories, online shoppers have the ability to find small novelty items that may not be available for purchase at a local store.

Not only does Jumia offer a lot of the same products and medium to attract consumers, but it also tries to look like Amazon. While the websites are not visually identical, Jumia’s website looks and appears like a spin-off of Amazon, although do not know if their website runs as smooth as the US giant. Other similarities and overlap between the companies include: mobile shopping, shipping, online credit card payment, the ability to create an account for repeat customers, and wish lists for people who have set-up said accounts. Jumia has also adapted to the use of social media and participates on Twitter and Facebook, like their Amazon counterparts.

Jumia is trying to differentiate itself in a few areas, but the one with the most attention is it’s concept of pay at delivery, where the customer wouldn’t have to pay until the product is shipped to their door. This is a high risk-high reward concept; however, due to the lack of trust in African countries, this may be a way to grow sales at a higher rate.

Beyond the similarities in the business models between the two companies, Jumia could partner with Amazon to develop tremendous synergies to help Jumia grow its business at a faster and more credible rate. An obvious synergy would be Jumia partnering or contracting with Amazon to help build out Jumia’s web platform to ensure operations run smoothly and reduce the risk of their website crashing or failing. Currently Jumia struggles with fulfilling customer orders to specifications, and this is an opportunity to minimize those issues and concerns. This wouldn’t be new to Amazon as they have been in this space before with many large US retailers, such as Target for instance, so they are open to the idea and would know how to improve Jumia’s current website and e-commerce. This would help Jumia create some credibility and trust amongst users in Africa and ensure a good user experience occurs.

Another synergy available would be for both Amazon and Jumia to use each other’s distribution centers and supply chain networks. While Amazon doesn’t conduct business in Africa, they could leverage Jumia’s infrastructure to get product from Africa to their distribution centers in a more cost effective manner. The same can be said for Jumia, whose struggles getting products into Africa have been well chronicled for the expense and quantity of the products they are able to get. Using Amazon’s supply chain or distribution centers would provide higher volume sales and higher margin. Another way Jumia could leverage Amazon’s supply chain and logistic experience is to understand how to reach customers that live in more rural areas, which has been a challenge of Jumia to deliver to those customers in a timely manner.

Lastly, a large synergy available would be the adaptation of mobile and digital media offered through different devices currently available through Amazon.com. Amazon is becoming a large player in digital media, such as books, movies, and games, and this would be a huge step for Jumia. If Jumia could partner and contract with Amazon, or build their own experience, it would provide the African customers more value of visiting Jumia.com and would provide Jumia another source of revenue to grow their business and enterprise value. With the number of customers already using mobile devices to shop Jumia, this would enhance their experience and create addition long-term revenue growth.

To conclude, Jumia has exploded onto the scene and provided Africa with a e-commerce solution that they have never had before. The company has grown at an exponential clip, and changing the way Africans shop. They do however have a lot of work to do to ensure credibility, trust, and long term success as a company. Leveraging past experiences from companies in more dense countries could provide them with that extra bit of knowledge and innovation for even further growth.

How Jumia Works?

Under the Jumia service, the merchant sends the items to Jumia’s warehouse for both physical inspection and storage before the items are listed on the online store. This means that items labelled as Jumia   are checked for quality and physically located at Jumia’s warehouse when you order, which results in faster and cheaper shipping.

How Jumia Benefits Online Shoppers

The fact that Jumia directly handles your orders comes with five major benefits.

1. Cost Effective Shipping

When you order products labelled Jumia, your shipping cost is consolidated, which is more cost effective. Let us say you want to buy three standard items labelled Jumia  , you pay almost the same cost as if you are ordering just one item. Say the shipping cost is 1000 Naira, Jumia will likely charge you 1000 Naira for all three items.

Of course, there are exceptions like for bulky items, but the cost will never cost anywhere near what you would have paid if you ordered 3 items that were not labelled Jumia. To compare, the same order could cost 3000 Naira (or even more) without the service.

But why is shipping cheaper with the service? The answer is simple. Consolidated shipping. Because all the three items are in Jumia’s warehouse, they are packaged together, and you pay the appropriate fee depending on weight and bulk. For products not labelled Jumia, especially when you are ordering from different merchants, each merchant will ship each item independently resulting in higher shipping cost.

2. Faster Shipping

Jumia is more efficient at handling and shipping than its independent merchants. Since Jumia is directly responsible for fulfilling orders of Jumia   items, they tend to be delivered faster.

In fact, Jumia promises next day delivery for items ordered in Lagos and from 2 days delivery for items ordered outside Lagos. Sometimes, you can even get your order same day in Lagos if you order before 11am.

Items that are directly fulfilled by Jumia arrive faster. Independent merchants take longer to deliver, and in a few cases, they even end up not delivering the item. Jumia is even offering free shipping in Lagos, if you order items labelled Jumia   worth 10,000 Naira or more.

3. Receive all your Orders at once

Say you ordered a shirt, a pair of trousers, and a pair of shoes from different independent merchants on Jumia. Each merchant will be responsible for shipping one item. So, three days after you placed your order the shirt arrives, then a day later the trousers arrive and two days later the shoes arrive. Say these items of Fashion are to be worn together, you will have to wait 3 days from the delivery of the first item to see how they all fit together.

With Jumia   all three items are shipped together by Jumia, even though they may be offered by different merchants. You can get them as fast as the next day if you live in Lagos. You can start trying all the items on immediately. This is the very definition of convenience.

4. Buy Quality Products

Jumia physically checks items offered by independent merchants who subscribe to Jumia   before listing them on their website. This ensured one, that the product is available and two, is of good quality.

Ordering items from merchants who subscribe to the Jumia   service is one way to protect yourself from buying substandard products at Jumia.

5. Better Customer Service

Jumia offers better customer service than its independent merchants. Buying on Jumia   is like buying from Jumia directly and results in a better shopping experience.

Free Shipping

Jumia is offering free shipping for Jumia   orders worth 10,000 Naira and above in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, and Abeokuta. This means that if you place an order for qualified items, Jumia will deliver them at no delivery cost to you to any location in Lagos within one or two days.

However, there seems to be a caveat: “Large items are not qualified for this offer”. Though it is not clear what Jumia’s definition of a large item is but am thinking like Refrigerators. This means that items like Mobile Phones, Laptops, and Fashion are qualified.

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