GeoPoll recently made research on the e-commerce landscape in Africa with focus on how youths behave when shopping online. With respondents from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Ghana, the data captured was from populations who have access to a mobile phone and basic internet services.
Respondents were asked about the platforms they used to make their online purchases. The resulting data indicates that consumers are using large online retailers and social media sites to make purchases more than smaller independent online retailers.
In every country where the survey was carried out, except for Tanzania, Jumia was ranked the number one most used online shopping platform, while Facebook and Instagram came close with 6 spots in the top 3 most used online shopping platforms.
GeoPoll concludes that the preference for large online retailers like Jumia may be due to the issues seen in product delivery in the region.
Among the other basic questions was to find out the last time one made an online purchase of a product.
Uganda reported the lowest number of reported online shoppers. 57% of Ugandan respondents indicated that they had never made an online purchase before, a complete opposite of Nigeria’s 58% of respondents that had made an online purchase within the past month. Only 14% of Nigerian respondents reported making an online purchase within the past 2-6 months.
Those who had reported making online shopping purchases in the past were then asked to indicate the items they have purchased online through a select-all-that-apply style question. Overall, the most popular items purchased online were electronics and clothing items; with a unique distribution among purchase categories per country.
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