Jumia Nigeria Chief Executive Officer, Temidayo Ojo, has said the company’s experience across Africa has demonstrated that e-commerce models designed around Western consumer behaviour cannot simply be transplanted into African markets.
Speaking on Broken Signals, Ojo said Jumia’s evolution over the past 14 years has been shaped by mistakes, significant financial losses and a gradual understanding of how African consumers actually shop, particularly amid inflation and declining purchasing power.
“We’ve made a lot of mistakes. We lost a lot of money as well in the process. And all of it is around us trying to fit a Western playbook into the African context,” Ojo said. He explained that Jumia’s more recent transformation has centred on developing a business and operational model specifically suited to the African market.
Over the last four years, he said, the company has significantly reworked its operations, customer experience, product assortment, logistics and approach to market expansion. Ojo said the starting point was a deeper understanding of the African consumer, describing Nigerians as highly value-conscious and price-sensitive consumers operating within households where purchasing power is limited and priorities frequently shift.
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For Jumia, this understanding prompted a fundamental change in the products it offers. Rather than concentrating heavily on premium global brands, the company began increasing its focus on more affordable brands that provide consumers with access to products at prices they can realistically afford.
Ojo recalled visiting manufacturing facilities in Shenzhen, China, where products for several major international brands were being manufactured alongside less globally recognised brands. The experience reinforced his view that brand recognition does not necessarily determine the quality or relevance of a product for Nigerian consumers.
He said Jumia subsequently changed the composition of its inventory, with its fulfilment centres increasingly carrying brands that may be unfamiliar to Western consumers but are more aligned with the purchasing power of its African customers. The same philosophy, he said, has influenced Jumia’s logistics strategy.
Rather than building an expensive delivery infrastructure designed primarily around speed and convenience, the company has focused on developing a reliable and cost-effective system capable of delivering products at prices consumers can afford.
“For us, it boils down to what is most important to the consumer,” Ojo said, noting that affordability and access can be more important than speed, particularly outside Nigeria’s major cities.
He pointed to consumers in smaller towns who may travel significant distances to access a wider range of products, often paying higher prices because of transportation and distribution costs.
By making products available at similar prices across locations and bringing them closer to consumers, Ojo said Jumia can address a more fundamental challenge than simply offering faster delivery.
Ojo also highlighted the role Jumia has played in lowering barriers to entrepreneurship through its J-Force programme, which was created to help drive e-commerce adoption by connecting offline consumers and potential entrepreneurs with the digital marketplace.
He recounted the story of a J-Force agent who eventually became one of Jumia’s major sellers, generating more than $100,000 in monthly revenue.
The entrepreneur initially started the business from his living room, using Jumia’s platform to create a virtual storefront without the traditional costs associated with opening a physical shop, stocking inventory and hiring staff.
According to Ojo, the entrepreneur would only purchase products from the market after receiving orders, before using Jumia’s logistics infrastructure to fulfil them. For the Jumia CEO, the story illustrates the potential of e-commerce to create greater access for small businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs in a country where entrepreneurial ambition is widespread but traditional barriers to entry can be significant.
Ojo identified macroeconomic instability as one of Jumia’s biggest challenges, saying unpredictable changes in economic conditions and policies make long-term planning difficult for businesses operating in African markets.
He also highlighted regulatory uncertainty, particularly around data protection requirements, as an emerging challenge for the company. He said Jumia takes a proactive approach to regulatory engagement by working with authorities to explain its business model and identify areas where existing regulations may not adequately reflect the realities of digital commerce.
One example, he said, involves engagement with tax authorities to explain the difference between Jumia’s platform model and a conventional brick-and-mortar retail business.
Because Jumia connects buyers and sellers rather than simply owning all the products being transacted, Ojo said it has had to help regulators understand how transactions through its platform should be interpreted for regulatory and tax purposes.
He said the company also seeks to demonstrate the wider economic value of its ecosystem, including its support for small businesses, entrepreneurs and third-party service providers.
Looking ahead, Ojo said Jumia’s next phase of growth will focus less on pursuing “shiny” opportunities and more on expanding e-commerce penetration across existing markets. He noted that e-commerce penetration in Nigeria remains in the single digits, compared with significantly higher levels in Western and Asian markets, leaving substantial room for growth.
The company is therefore investing in expanding its reach beyond major urban centres and developing logistics infrastructure capable of serving underserved markets.
One major investment is a planned fulfilment centre in Abuja, which Ojo said will strengthen Jumia’s ability to serve northern Nigeria.
He also pointed to strong growth in parts of the South-South, including Calabar, Bayelsa and Delta, saying the pace of demand in some of these markets has exceeded expectations. Over the next three to four years, Ojo said Jumia aims to roughly double its market penetration to between 10 and 11 per cent while growing the size of the business threefold.
He acknowledged that achieving that ambition will require significant investment in logistics, particularly because logistics infrastructure does not scale as quickly as other aspects of the business.
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Addressing consumers who may have had poor experiences with Jumia several years ago, Ojo urged them to reconsider the platform based on its current operations rather than their pre-COVID experiences. He acknowledged that Jumia has made mistakes and experienced substantial losses during its 14-year journey, but argued that those experiences have helped shape a fundamentally different business.
“We’ve developed a model, a business model, an operational model that is tailored to our African context or Nigerian context,” he said.Ojo said improvements in deliveries, returns, refunds and the broader customer experience have transformed the company compared with its earlier years.
For him, the central lesson from Jumia’s journey is straightforward: African businesses must understand the consumers they actually serve rather than attempting to force imported business models onto local realities.
As Jumia enters its next phase, the company’s ambition is not simply to grow within Nigeria’s major cities, but to extend digital commerce to more consumers and businesses across the country by making access, affordability and value the foundation of its African e-commerce playbook.
