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Company on growth momentum as total orders up 39% to 4.3m
Jumia Technologies, Africa’s leading eCommerce and consumer goods marketplace, recorded its largest ever campaign of annual sales as the company saw its gross merchandise value (GMV) hit $150 million from the just concluded 2021 Black Friday campaign.
The company also recorded a 30 percent year-on-year increase in the merchandise value and the total orders during the campaign surged 39 percent year on year to 4.3 million.
Since the introduction of the Black Friday shopping festival concept in Africa in 2012, it has become a much-awaited campaign for the growing number of consumers, sellers, and ecosystem partners. There was an accelerated growth for Jumia as the event saw strong seller participation with over 46,000 active sellers during the campaign compared to 41,500 the prior year.
Jumia Group in an unaudited web update posted on its disclosed that the Black Friday campaign held between November 5 and November 30, 2021, saw a record of almost 40 million unique visitors to its platforms, an increase of 27 percent year-over-year, while the campaign video content recorded almost 190 million views on social media.
Juliet Anammah, the chairperson of Jumia Nigeria, explained the model and the strategy adopted by the eCommerce giant during the 2021 campaign as it leveraged technology to accelerate sellers’ growth.
“As part of the event, we seek to offer our consumers attractive deals on a broad range of relevant products, alongside engaging and localized content such as games, videos, and original music and offline events. We posted a record of almost 40 million unique visitors to our platforms, an increase of 27 percent year-over-year, while our campaign video content recorded almost 190 million views on social media.
“Our consumers are increasingly turning to Jumia for their everyday needs with the top three fastest growing physical goods categories in volume terms being Fast Moving Consumers Goods (“FMCG”), followed by Beauty and Fashion,” she said.
During the 2021 event, Juliet said Jumia’s top 20 physical goods sellers tripled on average their GMV year-over-year. “Our restaurant partners were an integral part of the success of the campaign, offering discounts and exclusive meal deals on our platform. GMV of the food delivery category almost doubled year-over-year and the top 20 restaurants during the 2021 event experienced on average 167 percent GMV growth year-over-year.”
Leveraging the strong reach and consumer engagement on the company’s platform, Juliet revealed that all Jumia sellers often take the opportunity of the Black Friday campaign for new product launches. For example, in this year’s edition, Xiaomi chose Jumia for the exclusive launch of the Xiaomi Mi 11T phone in Egypt.
According to the report on the company’s website, Jumia seamlessly scaled its logistics capacity for the event to handle peak volumes where Jumia Logistics handled 5.3 million packages during the campaign, which is more than double the average monthly package volume in the first 10 months of 2021.
“While we handled significantly more packages than the rest of the year, we remained focused on providing the best customer experience possible while working on reducing delivery times. During the Black Friday campaign, 58 percent of packages reached consumers the next business day while the average end-to-end delivery time decreased to 1.5 business days, compared to 2.2 business days in the 2020 Black Friday campaign,” she said.
