Jumia, Konga, others, and issues they need to fix for discount season

abiola

November 3, 2017 1:11 PM

Mixed feelings have trailed past Black Friday promotional events in Nigeria.

The Black Friday ‘madness’ is filling the air worldwide now in 2017 and Nigerian e-commerce retailers like Jumia and Konga are already setting the pace with their ads popping up at every turn online and offline.

In the US, there has been talks about how the brick and mortar stores are getting to a state of ‘’out of the consumer’s mind”, making a case for the digital retail businesses like Amazon, that people would rather order for products from the comfort of their homes than have to go queue heavily in a traditional store in the name of Black Friday.

The e-commerce retailers in Nigeria unarguably made the Black Friday movement popular, and it’s been going on for over three years now.

Whether or not the online stores will do it better than the offline ones is not our major case here, but we want to look at the issues faced in the past that potential Nigerian shoppers would rather not experience again.

Some of these concerns include:

If there are actually discounts on the products - because some customers have the market price history of some products, and it was reported in 2014 that one of the e-commerce sites actually put at a discount the same price the product was selling for before Black Friday came.

A case of reducing prices for less popular products - People have complained in the past that products that actually got discounted are the ones that customers do not give a crap about.

The website becomes slow and draggy - Complaints about the online stores’ inability to handle the high influx of buyers on their websites, with prospective buyers having to wait for several minutes to view products or even check out after shopping has also been a source of irritation.

abiola