Tales of an Online Entrepreneur

My name is Oyaleye Sunkanmi, and I'm a online fashion retailer who got introduced to the business by a friend. I started out selling shoes on one of Nigeria's biggest online malls, Kaymu, and as every business, it has its ups and downs. I'll start by telling you how amazing and surprisingly overwhelming it can be selling on a platform like Kaymu. 

Selling on Kaymu requires that you sign up as a merchant/seller, which is just as easy as signing up for an email address, after which you list your items for sale, in my case, shoes, then it goes through the approval process for quality control check. When your products get approved, then you wait and hope they catch the attention of online shoppers (of course it goes without saying that your pictures have to be as attractive as possible, cos that's ultimately what will catch the attention of buyers). Warning though, you don't want to be deceptive with the images you upload online when the items you’re selling isn’t anywhere as good-looking as the item displayed online.

As a new seller on the platform, it might take a while before you start getting many orders, in a week, you might get a single order, the following week, your average might increase to 5, but I can assure you, if you exercise just enough patience, it only gets better and better, and you'll begin to have an increase in the number of orders you get each week, I'm talking about figures growing to an average of about 10-20 orders daily after a period of about a month or even less. Then that's when the challenge really comes in.

You see, these orders that are coming in in their large quantities aren't coming in from just a single state, but from all across the nation. Most sellers online are Lagos residents, and it's very easy filling an order in Lagos by going to do the delivery yourself (Kaymu been the only online market place that allowed self-fulfillment of orders as at the time I started), after which you collect your money and do a turnover. But for orders outside of Lagos, you'll most likely need to do a drop off at one of Kaymu's designated courier companies, either AIG Courier or Courier Plus, to make the dispatch for you. This usually takes time especially considering the fact that most online shoppers opt for the POD (pay on delivery ) option rather than a prepaid option where they use their cards. Courier companies would be more inclined to make a quicker dispatch of a prepaid item where they don't have to worry about having to collect cash from the buyer, who in a lot of cases are unserious, as some would tell the delivery man that the order took too long so they've spent the money or some very weird excuse of some sort. Oh! Here's a classic one, and it isn't made up either ("Oh, I'm sorry, I was just testing whether the order would go through").
This is actually after calling the buyer to confirm the order with them (because it is required of you to do so) and they approved that you should dispatch it.

There are several other challenges of course, like returns of items after buying them (because you'll most likely have a 7-day window return policy). The issue of your money not getting back to you on time because of the time it will take for the courier to dispatch your order, after which they will have to pay Kaymu, and Kaymu in turn pays you, that could take anywhere between a week or two or even a month after your order has been dropped off with the courier for dispatch.

As you stay longer on the platform while maintaining a good record as a seller, your rating as a seller also begins to increase. Starting out first as a seller on probation, from which you become a bronze seller, bronze to silver, then to gold, then finally, to being a diamond seller (AKA trusted seller); and of course it goes without saying that your orders also begin to increase almost exponentially, resulting in one not being able to fulfill up to 40% of ones entire orders, because, depending on what you sell, say shoes of like 5000 Naira, you begin to have orders in their hundreds on a daily basis from all across the country. Also, there is no way one can stay in business if 100% of those orders are being fulfilled and 70% are going outside Lagos, resulting in most of one's business capital being out of one's hands. 

But the truth is, platforms like Kaymu and Konga have really helped groom a lot of entrepreneurs, especially young university graduates like me, and in spite of the numerous challenges of selling online, it sure will get better with time as more and more Nigerians are beginning to embrace buying online and also overcoming the fear being swindled by sellers after making payments for an item with their cards, as managers of the platforms ensure that buyers confirm that they have received their good before they pay the money to the seller.

Selling shoes online opened my eyes to a lot of things, I began to explore other avenues to make money online, which lead to me venturing into sales of wrist watches, and later embarking on building my own website which is near completion already, so I can have more control over the sales and affairs of  operations and cash flow.

I really cannot pour out everything in my head coherently without writing an entire blog, because there are still a lot I wish I could churn out in words, but I think I would like to cut it here.

If I would say anything to young entrepreneurs interested in venturing into the online industry, I”ll say “This is a goldmine which hasn’t even started being mined yet, the potential for this industry in a country like Nigeria is very immense and in as much as there are lots of online platforms springing up every day, all of them still cannot meet up with the ever growing demand of the Nigerian consumer”.