The Nigerian E-Commerce Problem Nobody Is Solving, And the Company That Already Has the Answer.

The Nigerian E-Commerce Problem Nobody Is Solving, And the Company That Already Has the Answer

By Vincent Uebari | Business Development Consultant, Abuja, Nigeria vincentuebari.web.app | Uebari Vincent

“If you didn’t read about the platform, there is no reason we’re having this discussion” — Dr. Eke Eke, CEO of BitMarte told me on the call we were to discuss about getting new merchants on his platform.

I replied — “I’m sorry Sir, I set out to research about the company, but on the way researched instead about the history of e-commerce and online stores in Africa in general & the challenges they face and then found the company that will revolutionize the industry, they have the data and infrastructure even if they’re not in the online shopping/e-commerce sector.”

“Hmmm, let’s hear it then.”

For online stores to thrive, it has to follow the trust. In Nigeria, unlike Europe, America and Australia, trust does not reside in corporations, institutions and logos — trust resides in people and relationships.

Our logistics is different because our addressing system is different. In our neighbourhoods, what the map calls an area and what the public transports and people living in an area call it are most times different. This leads to irreconcilable logistical gaps when foreigners wish to transfer their tech to us, e.g. Amazon.

The online store sector doesn’t need another app or company. It needs someone to identify every place where current online shoppers and would-be online shoppers face frustration, feel excluded or afraid, and fix each of them, with a solution tailored to the Nigerian market and Nigerian people.

What are these problems & feelings?

1. Fear of no physical location; Nigerians love whoever is taking their money to have physical locations.
2. Our addressing system is different: we understand it but the Amazons don’t.
3. Fear of being cheated: what you ordered vs what you got.
4. Lack of debit/ATM cards, so inability to make online payments.
5. Fraud or silence after payment.
6. For non-tech-savvy traders: ease of joining/setting up an online store/shop.
7. What’s in it for me? Why shop online when I can just buy it in the market?

A company in another sector in Nigeria has already fixed all of this without knowing. We will also delve into how.

Feeling 1: Fear of No Physical Location With Someone We Can Relate To

Nigerians always need a physical connection with where their money is or is going. This is the reason many people have not left their traditional banks for the new fintechs, they need a physical building to run to if they have a problem, a customer care they can see face to face & threaten if need be.

OPay has fixed this. They have physical agents scattered around with a known physical location, which are trusted members of the communities they reside in, already equipped with devices and connected to the OPay network, already financially active on the OPay system, and open to doing more to earn more.

You know when you waybill packages using DHL, then the package goes through fulfillment nodes as you track it with the tracking number DHL gave you?

It shows you: “Package left DHL office at Gbagada Lagos 2PM. Left Abuja office 6PM. Left Gwarimpa office in Abuja 8PM.”

Those are fulfillment nodes. Now OPay agents become those nodes. This eliminates the extra capital needed to create those nodes.

What these nodes will do:

• Pickup point and drop-off point.
• Cash acceptance for cash-on-delivery.
• A returning point in terms of dispute.
• A display point also, this is because when these agents become nodes, extra traffic goes to them, more people visit the points. So why not take advantage of this extra traffic?
• These agents can also place orders for customers/clients without smartphones.

And all of these earn them a commission.

Feeling 2: The Addressing Revolution

Online shops outside Africa & Nigeria will tell you one of the reasons they’re not in Africa or Nigeria is because we don’t have reliable addresses.

We do.

Not in a way that they know it.

OPay has agents in every nook & cranny in Nigeria. Give each a unique code according to their area, let shoppers pick the agent closest to them.

So instead of the logistical difficulty of guiding a delivery driver, you send your delivery to the closest OPay terminal close to you & either go there to pick it up or arrange how you’ll get it.

This way, we have just converted the entire OPay agent network into a national addressing infrastructure. No new capital. No new technology. Just a new application of what already exists.

Feeling 3: Fear of Being Cheated: What You Ordered vs What You Got

This is perhaps the deepest wound in Nigerian e-commerce. There’s a whole online trend about this; from fake to substandard products. You ordered Nike and got NIEK. Always sad.

Jumia has a return policy. Konga has a return policy. The problem is not the policy, it is that nobody believes it will work for them when it actually matters and sometimes they are just too tired/defeated to try.

OPay has fixed this.

When you place an order, your payment goes into escrow, not to the seller, not anywhere the seller can touch. The seller gets their money only after you confirm you received exactly what was shown. If you don’t confirm in 48 hours, it releases automatically. If you dispute, it holds until resolution.

This is the exact logic that Alipay used in 2004 to get 1.4 billion Chinese people to trust online shopping for the first time. It works because it removes the central fear: that you will pay, and then be powerless.

We further solidify this with smart verification.

Every seller on this platform carries their OPay transaction history as public credibility:

“This seller has completed ₦3.2M in transactions over 14 months with a 98% completion rate.”

This is not a star rating you can tell the people in your group to help you inflate. This is real financial behaviour, real transactions, real money, real time. The trader in Computer Village who has been moving 30 phones a week for the last two years now has a digital track record that speaks louder than any verification badge a platform can manufacture.

You cannot fake that. You cannot buy that. You can only earn it.

Feeling 4: “I Don’t Have a Debit Card”

A significant number of the people who would shop online in Nigeria have never owned a debit card from a traditional bank. Not because they are not financially active, some of them turn over more cash in a week than a branch employee earns in a month.

They are not excluded from commerce. They are excluded from the payment rails that online commerce was built on, rails designed by and for a different market entirely.

Some people don’t like cards. Some people don’t trust the internet or their phone enough to type their card details into it.

OPay has fixed this.

Your OPay wallet is your payment method. The same wallet you use to receive money, send money, buy airtime, buy data, pay DSTV, fund your betting wallet: that wallet checks you out. No card. No account number. No bank transfer to a stranger. Your money moves within a system you already use and already trust.

And for items above your current balance, OPay already knows your transaction history. It knows your financial behaviour better than any bank that has ever asked you for a payslip. That history automatically qualifies eligible users for:

“Pay ₦8,000 today. Pay the remaining ₦17,000 in 30 days.”

Not a loan application. Not a credit check form. A one-tap offer, made to you specifically, based on what you have already demonstrated you can handle.

This extends real purchasing power to a bracket of Nigerians that every online store in this country has been designing around, instead of designing for.

As the CEO of Moniepoint, Tosin Eniolorunda said: “The next phase of growth in Nigeria’s payments ecosystem will come from building credit products directly on top of existing payment infrastructure, using transaction data to unlock financing for the millions of small businesses that have historically been shut out of formal credit markets.”

Read article here.

Feeling 5: The Silence After Payment

Order placed. Money sent. Now what?

This is where Nigerian e-commerce experiences go to die. The silence after payment is the most anxiety-inducing part of the entire transaction. You don’t know if the order was received. You don’t know if it’s been packed. You don’t know if the rider is coming from Gwarimpa, or is yet to pick up your order. You don’t know if it’s real.

OPay has already taught us exactly how to handle this.

Remember when you’re about to make a transfer on OPay and before you enter your PIN, the app tells you: “GTBank network is currently experiencing delays, your transfer may take more time than normal. Do you want to proceed?”

We will replicate that in the online store.

You have the information. You decide. You are not a victim of a process happening without you.

That same principle governs every step on this platform:

Before you confirm your order: “Delivery to your area is currently running 3 hours behind due to traffic on Third Mainland Bridge. Expected arrival tomorrow before 1PM, proceed or wait?”

After you order, your item moves through agent nodes the way a DHL package moves through fulfillment centres, except in language you recognise: “Picked up from seller, Alaba 10:15AM. Arrived Oshodi agent node 11:40AM. Dispatched toward Surulere 12:30PM.”

When it’s almost there: the name and photo of the person carrying it. One tap to call them or reach them on WhatsApp.

You are never in the dark. You are never powerless.

Feeling 6: The Trader Who Has Never Sold Online, And Doesn’t Know He’s Missing Half His Customers

There is an entire economy in Nigeria the internet has not found yet.

The phone seller in Computer Village who moves 40 units a week and every one of those sales happened face to face. The fabric trader in Onitsha market whose loyal customers have bought from her for over 20 years and not one of them found her via social media or through a search engine. The Ankara designer in Aba whose craftsmanship rivals what you see on international fashion platforms but whose reach ends at her personal Instagram following.

These people are not offline because they chose to be. They are offline because the process of coming online was built for someone else.

Jumia seller onboarding: business registration documents, bank account details, product listing form, approval waiting period.

Ours: open app, take a photo of your item, write the price, add your OPay number. Live in 90 seconds.

For the seller without a smartphone, the nearest OPay agent assists them: lists their products, takes the photos, sets them up. The agent earns a fee. The trader gets a digital storefront for the first time in their career. The platform gets real inventory with real people behind it.

And because we already have their OPay account, we already have everything we need to verify them: BVN, transaction history, phone number. No extra documentation required. The data is already sitting there.

Feeling 7: “What’s In It For Me To Keep Coming Back?”. Why not just shop instead from the market or physical store?

This one is subtle. And it is genius when done right.

OPay already knows how this works. Every time you buy airtime or data on OPay, a portion comes back to you as cashback, not withdrawable, not transferable, but fully redeemable to buy more airtime or data. It does not sound like much until you realise you have accumulated ₦10,400 in cashback and your next three data subscriptions cost you nothing.

This happened to me. I once accumulated almost ₦9,000 in cashback & when I noticed it, I recharged ₦5,000 airtime. Once that airtime dropped, it felt different. Long story short, I don’t buy airtime or data from any platform other than OPay.

You didn’t plan to stay. OPay made leaving expensive.

The same mechanic runs on this platform. Every purchase earns you shopping credit. Redeemable on your next order, not the order after that (like Temu), your next one. The incentive to return is immediate, not theoretical.

And then there is the intelligence.

The app watches how you shop. Your top 6 most reordered items sit as one-tap buttons on your home screen, the same way OPay surfaces your 6 most-transferred amounts below the input field so you don’t have to type. What used to take five clicks now takes one.

It knows you recharge ₦2,000 data every Tuesday. It knows you order provisions at the end of the month. It knows the price you paid last time. When the price has gone up, it tells you before you check out.

You are not just shopping. You are being served by a platform that is paying attention.

“So You’re Saying OPay Should Go Into E-Commerce?”

I’m saying the company that understands what OPay built, and why it works, should go into e-commerce. Or better, should build the e-commerce layer on top of the infrastructure OPay has already laid.

The physical agent nodes are there, hundreds of thousands of them. The payment rails are there. The user trust is there. The seller base is there: 40 million registered accounts, many of them traders. The financial behaviour data is there, years of it. The addressing solution is there, waiting to be reframed.

No e-commerce company launching in Nigeria has ever had all of this at day one. Jumia raised hundreds of millions of dollars and spent years trying to build a fraction of what OPay already owns.

The sector does not need another app.

It needs someone to look at what already exists, understand it deeply, and connect the dots that everyone else has been walking past.

“Alright, we will get back to you,” he said.

I’m Vincent Uebari, a digital-first business developer based in Abuja, Nigeria. I identify, approach and convert markets for businesses in Nigeria.

I have done a more in-depth strategy on this, featuring:

• A more detailed execution of these ideas due to current realistic market conditions.
• Go-to-market sequence for the first 30 days through to the first 3 years.
• Market categories and how to adapt them to this product.

Jumia tried to build Amazon in Africa but had difficulties due to infrastructure Africa lacked, and had in a different shape & form.

Remember: to build a product that survives in Africa, in Nigeria, we need to ask ourselves: what is making the Nigerian user feel excluded, frustrated, or afraid? And how do we make that disappear entirely?

That question, applied relentlessly, is how OPay changed banking. It is how commerce will be changed too.

Vincent Uebari is a Business Development Consultant and digital-first business developer based in Abuja, Nigeria. He works with businesses across Nigeria to identify, approach and convert markets. Portfolio: vincentuebari.web.app | X: @Ueb_Vincent | Linkedin: Uebari Vincent