uAfrica gets ready to go on an African adventure

South African ecommerce outfit uAfrica is ready to make its African play. The company today announced that its first forays into the continent will see it target Nigeria with a trial Proof of Concept (POC) partnership before expanding into Kenya and, eventually, Uganda.

The Nigerian project will see the company partner with MTN Business customers who will be able to develop their own online shops through uAfrica.com.

“uAfrica.com’s goal is to enable 1 000 online stores outside of South Africa in the next 12 months,” said Andy Higgins, Managing Director of uAfrica.com. “We have also identified Nigeria as one of our biggest markets in Africa and predict that in time they will outgrow South Africa and become our biggest market in Africa, so we’re thrilled to have launched our pilot project to such an enthusiastic response with our Nigerian partners.

Founded in 2004 and, in its current guise, provides cloud-based ecommerce services to small and medium-sized businesses across Africa, although this marks the first time it has actually sought to provide localised services for the continent. Prior to 2012 uAfrica, was known as Jump Shopping and functioned as an online comparative shopping service.

The ecommerce player seems all too aware that anyone wanting to enter the Nigerian market will find itself coming up against the might of Konga and Jumia, both of which have built big profiles in what many felt would be an incredibly difficult consumer space.

Rather than targeting consumers therefore, uAfrica has gone after SMEs in what it says is a bid to support local entrepreneurial merchant startups within the market.

Initially uAfrica will offer basic online storefront services followed by additional services around payments, logistics and marketing support and will later launch a multi-channelled selling solution to these customers.

At this stage, it also seems that the company is aware that it will have to overcome a couple of serious challenges, including:

• Payments, although outside of South Africa Cash On Delivery (COD) is the most widely used form of payment and;
• Logistics, as the maize of informal roads and walkways create undefined addresses to households with some consumers even resorting to pinning their delivery location on a Google map.

On the other hand, it sees the massive growth of Jumia and Konga, as well as the role ecommerce has played in Nigeria’s recent boom, as a sign that it absolutely has to be in the Nigerian ecommerce space.

Funding for the African expansion most likely came from the US$1.5-million it recently raised from Higgins himself and online auction site Bidorbuy, another company with strong ties to Higgins.