You snooze,you loose.

"By the time most people figure out what they really want and how to go about it,it's usually late" My ally Davis Joe found this out the hard way if he had started his E-commerce store right 2 years ahead of others but it was too late for him.

At the time E-commerce was new at my country when it first started.People only heard of Amazon and Alibaba but it never appeared to Africans that the idea would be replicated in Africa especially Kenya where Loyalty is a scarce commodity in people's line of business.Therefore lots of people were naive selling their stuff online.The concept where you would buy something literally from your cellphone and receive it with FREE SHIPPING seemed too good to be true to some.Majority of the people thought that it was more of a way to scam people and so it ended up as a Tinkerbell effect where number of people believing it to be false increasing from True to False.

Tinkerbell graph

And so Two years down the line He decides to open up a Jumia Store.

Jumia logo

He would sell African Handbags,African Sandals,African Chondo.By that time Jumia had already been saturated and with literally every nook and cranny having a store on Jumia, selling and getting a customer was slow and If you probably made a sale you must appeare on top on the search listing and with a better price of course so it took him a while before getting his first order and when he did the first time He was happy.

A customer wanted a handbag and since he never had the resources to stock up the Handbags he had planned whenever he got a customer he would further give the person responsible for making the African Handbags the order after depositing half to ensure seriousness in the business.So after the handbag was made he would go pick it up then drop it in Jumia's fulfillment center near in City.

At first we had to scout around Nairobi town to find a place where they usually sold such bags and after getting to kariokor we knew we had made it so we had to find for the cheapest vendor/artist since it's a marketplace having different Kenyan ethnic cultures displaying their traditional crafts such a bags,sandals, famous chondo,vitenge,African cooking sticks..So we find a woman named Pamela decided to be crafting for us at a user-friendly price

Subtracting Jumia's marketplace fees plus the logistics(picking the goods/items to the drop off station) and also the cost of buying the bag it .Business starts being lucrative because with 10 such sales one would make $200 + very easily by a third party company literally doing all the work for you and so Davis Joe decided to invest his time and skills customizing his store by inserting SEO friendly keywords that would get him on top of the Jumia search engine.But it was months before receiving an order so Davis went to upcountry and this meant if any order came he would not be able to full fill it.

On Wednesday he gave me his Jumia store login details plus password since that is what one is required to input once you were there and so after meeting Pamela on Wednesday and Davis ensuring he had cleared the balance I walk straight to the fulfillment center which took me a while to find it since I had never been there.