My groceries came in from Konga yesterday afternoon. I immediately felt like ordering more. When buying stuff online is this easy, you never go back. Sorry, Addide.
Addide is a supermarket just a couple of blocks away from my house. But I prefer paying from my computer and collecting my stuff in my house than spending even as little as 30 minutes rummaging through supermarket shelves.
It will happen sooner or later. E-commerce might not disrupt brick and mortar retail in a dramatic fashion, but they’ll certainly cannibalise a good chunk of their existing market. It’s already begun in Lagos and Abuja, largely because that’s where most of Nigeria’s online activity comes at this point in time, but it will inevitably spread across the country as broadband and mobile connectivity reaches into all the nooks and crannies.
That is not to say brick and mortar stores will go out of business. On the contrary, they’ll still be very relevant, a reliable redundancy for that time when you forget to order that tube of toothpaste online. Long live plan B.
However, there’s nothing stopping brick and mortar stores from fighting these newfangled digital retailers, and with their own weapons too. For instance, online services like BuyLikeMagic and Traclist help offline retailers, mom and pop stores, and even individual merchants digitise their inventory.
The benefits of coming online? Their brand and the goods they carry become discoverable to buyers online. They get an additional storefront that is open 24 hours a day without having to pay anyone for doing the night-shift. And all of this is possible without the levels of investment in money, time, technology and personnel that it would require to do e-commerce on the scale of a Jumia or Konga.
If I were a retail chain store like Addide, I wouldn’t try to fight the future. I wouldn’t ignore it either. I would embrace it.
In the grand scheme of Nigerian commerce things, I’m only one tiny person, but this single Konga experience has changed my buying habits for life. I reckon more and more people will experience similar e-commerce epiphanies everyday.
We’d like to hear your e-commerce experience, wherever you are. Have you bought stuff online? From where? Did you like it? And what effect has it had on your buying habits?
[image via Flickr/Mike]
