As online transactions continue to gain more acceptance by many business owners, an advertising expert and founder of Digipaver, Olaniyi Emmanuel has said e-commerce transaction has reshaped the face of business in Nigeria and Africa.
While speaking with newsmen at an e-commerce seminar in Lagos during the week, Emmanuel stated that while there has been a change to the traditional way of commerce in the last few years, many business people are yet to fully embrace the initiative that could transform and impact their business engagement positively.
According to him, the ease and speed with which online commercial transactions are made has compelled several people to prefer its simplicity to the rigor of having to walk into a physical retail store to purchase items.
He noted that while e-commerce might not fully overtake traditional retail completely because they both need each other and most especially to ensure something remains on the shelves in stores.
According to Statista, the revenue generated by online shopping in Africa was estimated to be around 27.97 billion USD in 2020 and has only increased since despite the upsurge in 2020 being attributed to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
With Nigeria ranked as the 33rd largest market for e-commerce with a revenue of 6.9 billion USD in 2021, placing it ahead of European giants Denmark and the South American country, Olaniyi maintained that the numbers are set to increase even further given the teeming youth population in Nigeria and the ever increasing access to the internet and smartphone usage.
“It is estimated that e-commerce revenues will show an annual growth rate of 16.36% resulting in a projected market volume of 14.11billion USD by 2027 (StaiSense). E-commerce will only grow even more in the coming years, and the activities recorded on the e-commerce space today is only testament to that fact.”
While there had been arguments against the credibility of seemingly faceless vendors on online marketplaces and payment platforms encountering occasional technical glitches and security breaches, Olaniyi insisted advantages in terms of speed and ease of transaction far outweigh all these.