What to Know About Starting An Ecommerce Business In Nigeria
So, WHAT IS E-COMMERCE?
E-commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services, or the transmitting of funds or data, over an electronic network, primarily the Internet.
These business transactions occur either business-to-business, business-to-consumer, consumer-to-consumer or consumer-to-business. E-commerce is conducted using a variety of applications, such as email, fax, online catalogs and shopping carts, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), File Transfer Protocol, and Web services.
EVOLUTION OF E-COMMERCE BUSINESS IN NIGERIA
E-commerce Business or Online Retailing could be traced to the likes of amazon.com, ebay.com, Alibaba and the likes.
In Nigeria, E-commerce Business was made popular through Dealfish (now OLX) and Google Trader (no longer in existence).
Afterwards, the establishment of Jumia brought a lot of innovation into the industry.
Konga joined the train swiftly before other stores like Escapade Nigeria, ryte deal, payporte, etc. joined the e-commerce emerging market.
HOW TO START AN E-COMMERCE BUSINESS
You have the following options:
Option 1 : Sell on other e-commerce merchant site such as amazon, kaymu, OLX, Jumia, Escapade Nigeria, Konga, GTBank SME, etc.
Option 2 : You can use an e-commerce site platform such as Openshopen, Shopify, Big Commerce, Yahoo Store, Volusion, 1shoppingcart, Wix, x-cart cloud, etc.
Option 3 : You can build your own site through Magento, Woocommerce, OpenCart, Joomla, etc.
HOW DOES E-COMMERCE BUSINESS WORK?
After taking a decision to build your own eCommerce site or use an existing platform, then you move ahead to do most of the following under listed points:
- You need to upload your products or services on your platform. Paying special attention to the image quality, product description & specification.
- Ensure your product pages meet minimum SEO requirements.
- Create awareness to intending users of your product via social media, google ads, News Letters, SMS, etc.
- Offline marketing, if need be, through word of mouth, letter of introduction, newsprint publication, etc.
- Also, your customer service personnel must be well trained and equipped with all the necessary information about what you sell and what your business stands for. They should be proactive enough in rendering necessary support to customers.
- Logistics: You should be flexible enough about this because it’s a key aspect of the business and is one of the major setback for e-commerce business in Nigeria.
- Getting customer feedback is also important in an e-commerce business much like every other business venture.
- Allowing customers to place orders via phone calls, text messages, emails, and walk-in customers could also enhance your e-commerce business experience.
CHALLENGES OF E-COMMERCE BUSINESS IN NIGERIA
Every business has its own challenges and the e-commerce business is not left out.
Some of these challenges include:
a) The introduction of Cash on Delivery option in an attempt to blend with the culture of the country ‘seeing is believing’. Hence, customers make fake orders and they have the liberty to reject the goods on delivery.
b) Misrepresentation of goods most especially the image of the product is also a setback to e-commerce business in Nigeria. Customers want to see exactly the product as it appears online.
c) Card Payment Frauds.
Note: This is a Guest Post From Escapade Nigeria Online Store.