Starting An E-commerce Business in Nigeria can be daunting and tasking for any newbie. In Africa, most people pay on delivery and sometimes they cancel at anytime.
Some E-commerce business agencies have lost millions just chasing people who showed interest and never turned up to collect the business they ordered, others start arguing on price of something they previously ordered online, a third set, simply switch of their mobile phones.
That said, starting an e-commerce business while very profitable comes with a myriad of challenges you must navigate and overcome if you’re going to be successful. There is a common among among E-commerce business owners that the business isn’t for the faint-hearted.
Let’s look at 6 things you know before starting an E-commerce business in Nigeria or any other African country.
1. You must understand your customer.
Ideal customer
Ideal Customer
“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else”.
–
SAM WALTON – TRAVIS BIGGERT
Understanding your customer is truly the gold of marketing and sales. If you can understand what makes your customer remove his hard-earned money and pay for a product or service, you have the key to selling anything on earth.
But when it comes to e-commerce in Nigeria however, understanding the customer helps you just as much as them. Customers can be very wonderful. After placing and confirming an order, on transit to the delivery point, the customer can simply switch off his mobile.
This has happened times without number, other time, on getting to the delivery point, the customer simply beings to negotiate on price. Understanding the customer helps you to develop the much needed patience and fortitude required to prosper in the E-commerce business in Nigeria.
2. You must understand the product
” Don’t find customers for your products. Find products for your customers.
–
SETH GODIN
Products
What does your product do for your customers? What are the angles you can use to market your products? Who would be attracted to images of your products? What different ways can you use your product? What are people already saying about your products?
Knowing your product inside out is one secret that will help you to be able to convince your customers in your sales pages and make them know why they must get that product and get it today.
The better you understand your product, the easier it would be to market it.
3. Your pricing
Pricing
Pricing is one of the most important things to take seriously when starting an e-commerce business. This is because it would determine whether you make profits, break even or losses.
You’re into business to make profits and you’ll easily run out of funds if you don’t replenish operational funds used.
Some things that affect pricing that you must consider include
• Advertising cost
• products cost
• delivery cost
• profit margin
• management expenses
Understanding all these would help you know how much your pricing should be.
Pricing will also help you determine what type of products to sell us some product you can actually sell 2X, 3X or 10X the original price, while others would only sell at 1.2X or 1.5X the price.
4. Choose The Location You Can Comfortably Cover
Location
Like everything else, Delivery within Nigeria has its troubles. Most startup E-commerce business do the same mistake of attempting to deliver nationwide without first understanding and putting in place systems to ensure efficiency.
This usually leads to undue stress on the business and the business person pulls out. In Nigeria some areas are not easily accessible and require a higher amount to reach. By attaching a fixed price to all products as delivery fee it might not be enough to cover for some specific areas. This definitely means you will start to run at a loss or money will be deducted from your profit.
When starting an e-commerce business in Nigeria, choose a suitable geographic area you can cover comfortably. This would definitely be less stressful and would help you understand the profitability of the business before attempting to scale.
5. Choose a singular role – outsource the rest.
Choose a singular role
A big mistake most e-commerce business persons do is trying to do everything by themselves and get all the profits. This is the surest way to lose the business.
Trying to do everything yourself with where you can and the purpose of doing the business becomes defeated.
The best thing to do is to divide your business into functional parts and understand the number one rule you should play in your business for you to be profitable and for the business to continue and outsource every other thing.
You could decide to manage a business and outsource call the other component parts such as delivery, product sourcing, packaging, and advertising. Doing this enables you to stay longer, endure less stress and effectively run and manage the business.
Never attempt to do every part of a business by yourself.
PS if you are looking for an e-commerce expert to help you run Facebook or Google ad, I’d recommend Sean B Samy
6. Learn directly from The Experts
Learn from experts in the industry.
Most people wake up and decide to go into a coma without any prior training or understanding the perks of the business. This is one surefire way of losing money.
When attempting to go into an e-commerce business in Nigeria and show you learn from an expert or someone who has been there and been successful. Like a mentor once told me “there are some things you can never learn on Google”.
Learn from experts, buy trainings and YouTube. The more actionable, practical knowledge you have, the less mistakes you make.
Click here to learn more about starting a profitable E-commerce business in Nigeria.
Now that you know exactly what to do to start your e-commerce business I wish you great success.
What has been your down experience in e-commerce. Kindly tell us in the comments section. We are dying to hear from you.
The future of e-commerce is untapped to say the least as the e-commerce industry is still growing and in its developmental stages. In this post we would talk about 10 E-commerce trends and how you can take advantage of them..
This one is simple, as the world gets faster and more people are adopting digital trends, we are expecting to see a rise in digital purchases for just about everything.
Over the last few years we have seen different strategies come and go, and new innovations to help drive sales being implemented. We have also seen the rise of platforms like eBay, Alibaba, Jumia, E-commerce enabling platforms like Shopify and the use of social media platforms e.g Facebook, TikTok, etc, and the use of contact platforms such as WhatsApp marketing and email marketing.
It’s fair to say E-commerce has drastically evolved over the last 10 years and we can only be sure of one thing; that there is more to come. Therefore, looking at the past changes and trying to predict the market, here are 10 trends that will affect the E-commerce market in the next 5 years which are already happening in 2022.
1. More online purchases
From buying everyday items like food to signing deeds of purchases for luxury items like lands, housing and automobiles; there would be exponential increase in the numbers of people adopting online purchases. In 2021 it was estimated that approximately 2.15 billion people shopped online.
Source : Haffkine Institute
Consequently, businesses who do not have an online presence will start to suffer and this is why we recommend putting your business on google and optimising your online presence to prepare you and your business for the e-commerce opportunities that will be emerging.
Learning how to sell online, including running Facebook ads and Google ads will be an asset and a highly sought after skill that if done effectively will bring in lots of sales. As a Facebook ads agency, you’ll likely see a surge in demand for your services. Learning how to position and distinguish yourself at the top will mean the difference between easing high (7 -figures) and earning meager fees for your services.
Let’s move on.
2. People will look for cheaper products online
Yes, more and more people will look for cheaper ways to get a product online. So what does this trend mean?
Well, let’s start with those who do not have their business online yet. Like I stated earlier, if your business isn’t online, you are being replaced – and fast. Since most people will be looking for a way to buy things cheaper online, and they’ll get them cheaper, operating just a physical store with no optimised online presence will be costly and ultimately unproductive.
Now, does this mean you should make your products cheaper? Heck no, you should increase your price if you are properly positioned. People don’t want to be treated like they are poor and certainly not online shoppers, but they want to know they are getting a good bargain.
3. More business will sell online than offline
Source: Brainmine web solutions
This is a no brainer. Alot more businesses are going to choose selling online because of its numerous advantages such as low storage space required, no need to hire staff, just to name a few.
This means at least 3X more profit and less expenditure. With more businesses going online, learning to sell will be of emmerse value to the smart entrepreneur. It would also mean those businesses with online and offline presencess will sell twice as much. Another opportunity to double your income as an entrepreneur.
But the best part of this remains the ease of doing business. Before the advent of E-commerce, you’d have to gather enough money, buy equipment and rent a space, register with the appropriate authorities way before you start your business. Today all you need is a smartphone to connect you with your customers.
Click here to learn more of the advantages of selling online
4. AI will help platforms, business learn more about shoppers leading to tailored experience
Platforms such as Shopify, Google, Facebook, TikTok all learn from user data using artificial intelligence systems and this means they are able to serve customers tailored ads that best match their interests. With Facebook for instance, the Facebook’s algorithm is able to identify a user’s interest after only 3 visits to specific pages.
This means smart advertisers will be able to reach the right audiences with the right messages while spending less. Smart advertisers can take advantage of this by utilising keywords their customers use often and targeting those keywords in their messages. As AI improves so does its ability to find the right customer and interact better with humans.
Platforms like Facebook and TikTok rely heavily on AI for matching the right message to the right person, however its still in its early stages and requires the input of a smarts advertiser to achieve its goals.
Learn more about how AI can help your business here.
5. More people will opt in for non traditional payment systems
According to Financer Worldwide, we would witness a 13.7% growth in the adoption of digital payments between 2021 and 2026. For online marketers this is pretty juicy news.
Source : factorHR
In most African countries some people are still not comfortable with online payments and payment on delivery is still the norm with special emphasis on small businesses. Big brands however like Alibaba, Jumia do not seem to face this trust problem.
For small businesses however this is a major problem. In European countries and the USA, this is less of a problem as most people already buy almost everything online and use credit and debit cards.
However, newer methods of payment such as using gift cards, cryptocurrencies, PayPal, Google pay and the host of them will continue to get more integrated into our everyday commercial activities.
A simple way to cash in this trend is to offer multiple payment options to your customers. These are relatively easy to setup and most of them do not require any technical expertise.
6. Product videos will drive lower CPMs and higher engagement
One of the nightmares with advertising is high cost per impressions (CPM) and low engagement. However videos have shown to consistently produce more engagement and therefore lower cost per thousand impression.
Using videos that show the products in action or product unboxing tend to drive more engagement as they interrupt the endless scrolling pattern and get the customer to engage.
Generally speaking videos will drive cheaper engagement than using photos therefore when advertising anything you should focus more on using videos of products, events, just about anything.
7. Subscription products / strategies will drive more sales
As a business, finding ways to make your products subscription based will drive more sales that one time products. A perfect example of this is the iPhone.
Creating upgradeable products that require the customer to make repeat purchases will definitely drive more sales as you’ll be spending less to acquire budget on acquiring new customers. This simply means the average lifetime value of a customer will be alot more.
This doesn’t work for only subscription products, as a business person, you could still achieve this by using email marketing and selling complimentary products. For example, a person who buys a juice mixer is 10 times more likely to buy a fruit peeler. Since we are still in the kitchen niche, that person is still very likely to buy a blender, a fridge, set of pots, frying pans and the list goes on.
Source : Michael Giannulis
This is one you should definitely not ignore if you want to make the big bucks with e-commerce.
8. Cost of advertising will continue to rise
You definitely don’t want to hear this one, but it’s not going away. As long as the cost of living continues to rise, just about everything else in life will continue to rise and advertising costs are not left out.
It would cost more and more to reach more people and it would take a smart advertiser to understand and apply the message with the best potential of engaging and stirring people to take desirable actions at the lowest possible cost.
Source : Rojgar Aur Nirman
This would involve using videos with benefit/fear based messages that are sure to break attention patterns and generate engagement. What you want to achieve is creating ads that generate alot of likes, comments and shares especially when using social network platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Figuring out ways to keep your advertising cost down while reaching a good number of people is fast becoming a trend and I recommend you learn more about how to advertise with more success for less on Facebook.
9. CRM systems, Lead generation strategies will continue to bring in more high ticket sales
As discussed earlier, cost of advertising will continue to rise and a smart advertiser must find ways to keep cost down. One of such ways is using Customer Relationship Management systems and Lead generation strategies.
PerfectView CRM online
Having a credible and efficient CRM system will ensure that you spend less to get and keep customers, enabling them make repeat purchases. This increases the lifetime value of a customer by several folds.
Using lead generation strategies will make advertising even cheaper, however it’s a long time strategy, but one that will pay off 10X more than just trying to make the sale today. Some lead generation strategies to implement include email marketing and WhatsApp marketing.
These two , CRM systems and Lead generation, especially when combined will be more useful in selling high ticket products that require a good deal of trust and longer time for the customer to make up his or her mind. It’s like building your own advertising platform where you can reach your customer anytime.
Learn more about CRM systems and Lead generation strategies here .
10. Competition will get fiercer
Source: QuestionPro
This goes without saying but, I’ll say it anyways, your competition will simply get fiercer. Even though it would be easier to do business, this very reason will make business competitive. As more and more people start to do business online, you’ll be having to spend more and get creative to reach acquire and keep more customers.
Smart advertisers will therefore try to figure out ways to outsmart the competition without having to reduce prices or spend too much on advertising. One good way to achieve this is via niching down.
By selecting one really good niche and dominating it, you become an authority name in that industry leading to easier trust from potential customers and therefore more sales at higher prices.
Summary
So there you have it. My top 10 future trends for e-commerce that are already happening in 2022. I’ve also shared with you simple strategies to position yourself for these changes.
If you advertise with Facebook, this course is highly recommended for you if you’d want to make lots of sales.
