By Allan Olingo

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Jumia has diversified from being the go-to platform for electronics and fashion to stocking everyday household products, including groceries. Jumia’s co-founder Sacha Poignonnec spoke to The EastAfrican's Allan Olingo.

Bio

Education:

Attended the EDHEC Business School in France. He holds a Masters degree in Finance.
Experience:

2012: Co-CEO Jumia (ex. Africa Internet Group).

May 2007 – Feb 2012: Associate principal, McKinsey & Company, based in Paris and New York.

2004 –2007: Accuracy manager at Aon;

Works: Jumia has 126 websites active across 23 African countries, thus covering 90 per cent of African GDP and three million customers.

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Jumia has been touted as the Amazon of Africa. How has Kenya driven the growth of your firm in the region?

We launched in Kenya and Cote d’Ivoire soon after we realised our model was viable in Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa and Morocco. Nairobi and Abidjan provided more proof that our concept was solid.

Since then, Kenya has been foremost among our big five markets, driven by innovation and a growing middle class. An extremely profitable markets driven mostly by good connection speeds, it has seen a growing number of people embrace online retail due to the extended time they spend on the web.

Jumia was known mostly for selling electronic products. What informed your shift to everyday consumer products?

We are committed to bringing value to our customers. True, we started out with a bias towards mobile phones and fashion. But we realised that these are not what our clients purchase on a daily basis.

This realisation informed our new focus. Today, our platform, across all our markets, offers fashion, electronics, groceries, hygiene items, household goods and fast-moving products as we seek to offer a wider choice to our customers.

Africa has many unique, cultural practices. How do you to work around this diversity in order to deliver results seamlessly?

This is an interesting question because countries, regions, cities and towns have different retail behaviour and culture so we must adapt in order to penetrate these markets.

We have created opportunities for our teams to customise the products meaning that the customer experience, type of product, and communication accord with a customer’s preference.

For instance, we have seen places where people after ordering online, simply wait for our phone call, while in others, people are willing to interact and engage us online through the computer Bots under our artificial intelligence programme.

That is why we have been flexible when designing our technology and enhancing our customer relations to accommodate the client’s preference, taste, culture, and demographic.

Recently, you launched a bot service in Nigeria employing artificial intelligence, which is novel in Africa. Do you think this will succeed in the African market?

There are many ways to access goods and services. On the physical side, we have more than 50,000 agents and then we have the chat bot developed jointly with Facebook.

People are always willing to try new services and this bot makes one feel that they are physically interacting with a real person.

However, it is not the only channel; our phone lines remain open and there are physical agents at hand. There are many channels and ways to ensure good customer experience and this is one of them. The app is pretty exciting.

How important is the data that you collect from your online platform and how does it assist in improving the services you offer?

We have millions of products and hundreds of thousands of pages of content, therefore it boils down to the relevance of our platform to the customer.

Through analytics and data crunching technology, we use the information we glean to enhance the customer experience and study the product suggestions people make. For us big data equals personalisation of what they see and experience.

How do you measure growth?

We look at a number of criteria, with the ultimate being the increasing number of customers using our platforms, mostly through successful transactions.

We also study traffic to get insights into consumer behaviour. We also address the supply side, as our mission is to connect consumers with local businesses.

In this regard, we look at the number of active vendors and logistics partners so that the retail chain is complete.

You recently launched a credit reference facility for your suppliers and vendors? What informed this?

We leverage transactional, operational and behavioural data in order to provide credit facilities to vendors who are the platform’s lifeline.

Having worked with these vendors, we realised that they yearned for growth but credit was proving to be a challenge. When we realised how difficult it was for them to get funding, we sought to solve the problem by using the Jumia data to provide them with better financing opportunities.

How will this work?

We decided to mine our vendor data, get the right financing partners who will extend credit to the vendors to help the SMEs grow their online businesses.

Basically, we will create a virtual Sacco through which the vendors can access financing at 12 per cent from various financial institutions. This would be a win-win situation for Jumia, its merchants and the financiers.

We provide references to our finance partners based on the scores of the vendors, and the financiers extend the working capital that vendors need to stock up on goods to sell on our platform.