After two unsuccessful expeditions into Nigeria’s e-commerce jungle, namely Kalahari and Dealfish, MIH have donned their jungle boots and straw hats for another attempt. The name of the latest adventure is Pricecheck.com.ng.
As the name suggests, the website is supposed to help buyers compare prices across different local e-commerce vendors with which they can make better informed buying decisions and get the biggest bang for their buck.
But that isn’t the case — at least not right now. After launching with as much noise as it is possible to make in the Nigerian techosphere at the moment (a bunch of articles on TechGawk), the experience is much like going to the Palms and finding all the stores empty, except for maybe Game.
It’s not like it’s a ghost town or anything. It’s just that there are only three vendors signed on to the price comparison platform.
Three whole vendors.
Which kinda moots the point of the whole exercise. There’s almost nothing to compare. If you’d like to see what a real price comparison site should look like, you should check out the older South African version.
Of course one does not expect that things would just leap into the stratosphere like a VTOL aircraft, or that the platform would be teeming with vendors right off the bat, there’s still a fair amount of runway to be covered before they can gain appreciable momentum. But a fairly recent count of active Nigerian e-commerce stores put the number at just under a hundred — which is still a really conservative figure, I’m thinking there are likely hundreds. Not all would meet their standards, to be sure, but you’d think they’d have found at least ten stores to get things going.
Speaking of which I’m genuinely surprised that Konga isn’t there at very, very least, why?
Having the two biggest e-commerce platforms listed would have made Pricecheck infinitely more useful than it currently is, because Jumia and Konga carry tons of similar products in similar categories. It’s so much of a no-brainer that it’s suspicious. I find it hard to believe that they didn’t try talking to Konga. Maybe the talks didn’t work out? I did a bit of asking around, and I now know for a fact that Pricecheck and Konga have indeed had a meeting of sorts. So it’s possible that we might see Konga on Pricecheck sometime soon. How soon? That’s anybody’s guess.
So far, I’ve been unable to reach Pricecheck for comment (although, there’s always the comments section). So till we see more vendor activity, the only conclusion to be had is that the would-be price comparison platform is currently functioning as just another exclusive Jumia storefront.
[image via Flickr/Michael Moore]
