Nigeria: Hotbed for Growing Q-Commerce Market in Africa

This month saw the launch of Jumia Food Mart in Nigeria, signaling the pan-African eCommerce giant’s first move into the quick-commerce space.

Jumia customers in Lagos will now be able to order up to 4,000 popular consumer goods on the platform, which aims to process deliveries in 20 minutes or less.

Commenting on the news, Jumia Nigeria CEO Massimiliano Spalazzi highlighted how speed and convenience are increasingly shaping consumer behavior and how the company plans to meet this growing demand.

“We believe that Jumia’s quick commerce offering meets our consumers’ demand for convenient, fast delivery of everyday products especially in this post-COVID era. Our micro fulfillment centers within neighborhoods will enable us to deliver to consumers in rapid time,” Spalazzi said, as reported in The Guardian Nigeria.

Company CEO Sacha Poignonnec told investors on a recent earnings call that this move is in line with Jumia’s broader plans across all its markets, which is why it is building out logistics capabilities to provide faster, more efficient deliveries to meet the growing emphasis on convenience for today’s consumers.

Learn more: Jumia Pins Hopes on Diversified Revenue Streams, Cost Savings to Reach Profitability

Poignonnec added that apart from the Zando brand in South Africa, the group’s average end-to-end delivery time was 1.6 business days, down 17% year over year.

However, Jumia isn’t the only company that sees an opportunity in the market for fast deliveries in Nigeria. One of the early movers in Nigeria’s Q-commerce space, logistics startup Kwik, has been making its own moves to grab a bigger share of the market, including a recent launch in Ibadan.

Unlike the dark store model being pursued by Jumia, Kwik doesn’t operate its own fulfillment centers. Instead, it provides retailers with an on-demand last-mile delivery solution that consists of a network of motorbikes, vans and trucks that promise to deliver to Lagos within two hours and Abuja within one hour.

See also: B2B Logistics Firm Kwik Launches eCommerce Storefront

Combined with its online storefront builder, KwikStore, the startup aims to establish itself as a leader within Nigeria’s eCommerce ecosystem by offering a range of tools to online retailers, ranging from Kwik’s logistics services to its payment solution KwikPay.

As Kwik’s founder and CEO Romain Poirot-Lelig commented when the startup raised a $2 million Series A round earlier this year, “We aim to become the premier app choice for African social sellers and traditional merchants going digital. Seamlessly integrating delivery, payment and eCommerce tools into one easy-to-use mobile app is an attractive proposition.”

More on this: Nigeria’s Kwik Raises $2M to Fuel Its Last-Mile Delivery Offerings

While many of the biggest international players in Q-commerce are conspicuously absent from the Nigerian market, there is one exception. Since last year, Spanish quick-commerce startup Glovo, which is owned by Germany’s Delivery Hero, has been offering its multi-category on-demand delivery platform in the West African country.

Currently available in Abuja, Ibadan and Lagos, the Glovo app allows users to order food and other items on their smartphone from a range of local outlets.

Glovo can be used to order the aggregator staples of fast food and supermarket items, but it also runs a general-purpose rapid courier service and can deliver goods from pharmacies, meaning the possibilities are only limited by what can fit on the back of a motorbike.

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