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BD Insider - The Yin and Yang of Digitising Africa's Informal Retail Sector
BD Insider - The Yin and Yang of Digitising Africa's Informal Retail Sector
To become a leading e-commerce startup in Africa and keep to their promise of ease
and convenience, they had to do two or more of these: have an expansive inventory
and invest heavily in marketing and ancillary solutions such as payment and
fulfilment, which includes building warehouses and last-mile delivery service.
More than a decade later, the emerging big guns of e-commerce in Africa are neither
an online store nor a marketplace. Instead, they are enabling e-commerce by
providing O2O (offline to online and online to offline service) services. These services
cut across sales/demand generation, inventory/content management systems,
payment/fintech solutions, and supply chain.
With the O2O services, retailers/merchants and brands can set up their online stores
and sell to customers directly. They can also drive online customers to their brick and
mortar store.
It’s worthy of note that fintech, logistics and some other non-native e-commerce
startups can and are participating in this New Retail or O2O e-commerce era. Like
our sponsor, Fincra. As a business that serves customers online, you can collect
payments from individuals and other businesses at no extra cost.
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This chart shows some of these companies enabling e-commerce, their kind of
service, and their primary target market. (Please, let me know if you have
suggestions.) In subsequent letters, I'll go deeper into selected e-commerce enablers
and how they are solving the problems of e-commerce in Africa. Because as we all
know fulfilment is at the epicentre of e-commerce and its enablement.
PARTNER CONTENT
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Fincra gives fintechs access to reliable payment APIs, allowing them to offer more
solutions to their customers and scale their services across Africa. The APIs are simple
to integrate and are designed to fit into any existing payment application. Learn more.
In October 2021, Nigeria launched eNaira, its central bank digital currency.
Meanwhile, Ghana indicated that they are in the advanced launching stageSubscribe
of the e-
cedi. Zambia is also carrying out research that will see to the launch of its CBDC.
Across the globe only nine countries have launched digital currency while fourteen
Across the globe, only nine countries have launched digital currency while fourteen
are in the pre-launch stage.
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