Ecommerce in Nigeria is growing rapidly, with more and more businesses looking to establish an online presence. One company that is making ecommerce easier for Nigerian sellers is Olist, a Brazilian company that expanded to Nigeria in 2019.
Olist provides an all-in-one ecommerce platform that allows small businesses and entrepreneurs in Nigeria to easily set up an online store and sell their products across multiple marketplaces like Jumia, Konga and social media.
With features like centralized inventory and order management, payment processing, shipping and marketing tools, Olist aims to empower these sellers to efficiently run their online businesses.
In this article, we will provide an overview of Olist and discuss the major benefits and challenges of using their platform for Nigerian ecommerce sellers.
We will also share tips for sellers looking to leverage Olist to boost their ecommerce business in Nigeria.
Overview of Olist and its operations in Nigeria
Olist was founded in 2015 in Curitiba, Brazil by entrepreneurs Tiago Dalvi and André Rafael.
The company aims to help small businesses establish an online presence by providing them with an all-in-one ecommerce platform.
Some key facts about Olist:
- It has over 7000 active sellers on its platform in Brazil
- Processes over 1.5 million orders per month
- Integrated with marketplaces like Mercado Livre, B2W, Via Varejo etc.
- Raised over $46 million in funding so far
Olist expanded to Nigeria in 2019 to tap into the fast growing ecommerce market in the country.
As per estimates, the Nigerian ecommerce sector is projected to hit $75 billion by 2025. Olist aims to enable small businesses in Nigeria to easily set up their online stores and sell products across multiple channels.
Here are some ways Olist empowers Nigerian sellers:
- Simplified online store creation: Olist provides an easy-to-use dashboard for sellers to quickly create a professional online store with product listings, descriptions etc.
- Multi-channel selling: Sellers can sell their products across multiple channels like Jumia, Konga, Social media using Olist’s unified platform.
- Centralized inventory: Olist syncs inventory across all sales channels. This simplifies stock management.
- Streamlined order management: Orders from all channels are centralized on Olist for easy management.
- Payments and Financing: Olist facilitates payments and provides financing options to sellers.
- Shipping: Olist optimizes and prints shipping labels for orders. Provides discounted shipping rates.
- Support: Dedicated support team to assist Nigerian sellers with any issues.
By providing these services, Olist aims to make ecommerce easy and accessible to small businesses in Nigeria.
How To Sell on Olist Nigeria
To sell on OList Nigeria, follow these steps:
- Visit the OList website or download the mobile app.
- Sign up on OList by providing your name, email, mobile number, and password.
- Post an ad by providing accurate details about your item or service, including a clear and eye-catching title and an appropriate price.
- Verify the authenticity of the payment made by the buyer.
To attract more sales on OList Nigeria, use a title that reveals the item name and its condition.
When buying on OList Nigeria, you can buy almost any item whether new or old at a very fair price.
To buy an item, click on “Show contact” to reveal the phone number of the seller or “Start chat” to automate the chat feature between you and the seller.
Benefits of using Olist for sellers in Nigeria
For small businesses and individual sellers in Nigeria looking to establish their ecommerce operations, Olist provides several benefits:
- Lower barrier to starting online selling: Olist enables anyone to quickly set up a professional online store within minutes. No need forTechnical expertise or designing skills.
- Selling on multiple channels: Sellers can seamlessly sell products across multiple channels like Jumia, Konga, Facebook, Instagram etc using Olist’s centralized platform. This expands their reach significantly.
- Unified inventory management: Olist’s unified inventory management across all sales channels is a major benefit. Sellers don’t have to manually sync inventory.
- Simplified order processing and fulfillment: Orders from all channels are unified under Olist for easy management. Automated processing and shipping label printing makes order fulfillment faster.
- Access to payments and financing: Olist facilitates payments from all sales channels. It also partners with financial institutions to provide financing options to sellers. This provides flexibility.
- Lower shipping costs: Olist has negotiated discounted shipping rates with major carriers in Nigeria. This reduces a significant cost for sellers.
- Marketing and advertising: Olist provides data-driven advertising and marketing tools to help sellers promote their products and drive sales.
- Dedicated support: Olist’s dedicated Nigerian support team helps sellers resolve any issues and provides guidance. Saves time and headache.
By handling the complexities of ecommerce operations, Olist enables even small sellers with limited resources to build and grow their online business efficiently across multiple channels.
Challenges of operating an ecommerce business in Nigeria
Nigeria offers massive growth opportunities for ecommerce businesses given rising internet penetration and adoption of online shopping. However, sellers also face some unique challenges in the Nigerian market:
- Low trust in online payments: Many Nigerian consumers prefer cash on delivery over online payments due to lack of trust and low banking penetration. This can impact sales.
- Logistics and shipping issues: Nigeria faces infrastructural deficits which can make product delivery difficult. Address verification is also a problem sometimes.
- High cost of logistics: The costs associated with shipping, delivery and last-mile transportation are quite high in Nigeria compared to many other markets. This eats into profit margins for sellers.
- Fragmented marketplaces: The ecommerce market lacks consolidation with too many small fragmented players. Managing multiple platforms can be an overhead.
- Poor digital marketing skills: Many small businesses struggle with digital marketing and lack resources to promote their online stores effectively to drive visibility.
- Legislative uncertainties: Nigeria’s evolving ecommerce regulations around taxation, consumer protection create uncertainty for sellers.
- Problems with payment collection: High incidence of fraudulent transactions and difficulty in collecting payments from customers can hamper the seller’s cash flows.
- Fierce competition: Increasing competition from international players like Jumia and Konga make it harder for smaller sellers to gain market share.
- Limited financial access: Lack of adequate access to financing options is a major problem, especially for small sellers.
By addressing many of these issues on their platform, Olist aims to ease sellers’ challenges in growing their ecommerce business in Nigeria.
How Olist addresses these challenges for sellers
Olist aims to address many of the challenges outlined above to help sellers grow their ecommerce business in Nigeria:
- Simplifies selling across multiple marketplaces: By providing a unified platform to sell products across different channels, Olist saves sellers the headache of managing multiple fragmented systems.
- Provides smoother logistics and shipping: Olist optimizes shipments and provides integrated tracking. This leads to greater efficiency in deliveries.
- Centralized inventory and order management: Olist’s unified inventory and order management improves organization and reduces overhead for sellers.
- Offer multi-channel digital marketing tools: Olist provides data-driven advertising and marketing tools tailored for different channels like Jumia, Instagram etc. This boosts a seller’s online visibility and sales.
- Facilitates payments collection: By integrating payment collection across marketplaces, Olist simplifies the payment process for sellers and improves collection rates.
- Access to financing options: Olist partnership with lenders provides sellers better access to working capital, inventory financing etc. This provides flexibility.
- Dedicated customer support: Olist’s on-ground Nigerian support team helps sellers quickly resolve issues and provides assistance across all aspects of selling.
- Takes care of regulatory compliance: Olist remains updated on Nigeria’s ecommerce regulations around consumer rights, taxes etc to ensure sellers remain compliant.
- Lower shipping costs: Discounted shipping rates negotiated by Olist reduces a major operational cost burden for sellers.
- Helps avoid inventory stockouts: Unified inventory management prevents overselling of products and avoids expensive stockouts.
By providing end-to-end solutions and support, Olist enables individuals and small businesses to minimize the challenges in operating ecommerce operations in Nigeria.
Sellers can focus on sales and business growth while Olist handles the complexities involved.
Key Takeaways
- Olist provides an all-in-one ecommerce platform to help Nigerian businesses and sellers grow their online operations.
- It offers vital benefits like easy online store setup, multi-channel selling, unified inventory management and streamlined order fulfillment.
- Olist addresses major challenges sellers face like fragmented systems, logistics issues, lack of financing and marketing support.
- Many Nigerian entrepreneurs have leveraged Olist’s solution to boost the growth of their ecommerce business.
- Olist enables even small sellers with limited resources to minimize overhead and scale their operations through integrated technology and support.
Conclusion
Ecommerce presents a major opportunity for Nigerian businesses to boost their reach and revenues. However, many small sellers struggle with the complexities of setting up and managing online operations.
Olist empowers these businesses by providing an integrated, full-service ecommerce platform to sell across multiple channels, streamline operations and access supportive solutions for payments, logistics, financing and marketing.
Olist enables Nigerian sellers to minimize overhead costs and challenges by automating and optimising cumbersome backend processes.
They can focus on sales and business growth while Olist handles the technology and operations.
The company’s expansion to Nigeria has already helped multiple entrepreneurs and small businesses augment their ecommerce capabilities and drive growth.
As online commerce continues its rapid growth across Nigeria, solutions like Olist will ensure small players can leverage its opportunities and compete.
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