20 May African Consumers in Kenya and Nigeria Hungry for eCommerce and Ready to Pay Online with Nigerian Debit Card and Kenyan M-Pesa

Online eCommerce and mCommerce platforms are well suited to bringing reputable and established multinational eCommerce and mCommerce businesses to new consumer markets.  These growing consumer bases are hungry for international goods and services and increasingly in a position to access and enjoy new products and services.  

Some emerging markets are seeing growth in middle class consumers.  Consumers who have made an online purchase has in some emerging market countries increased from 3% to 34% in the past four years.  

Most of this eCommerce and mCommerce activity has been seen on mobile.  Emerging markets have leapfrogged developed world markets as a result of the mobile phone penetration and use as opposed to purchases via internet.  Internet penetration pales into insignificance when it comes to mobile.  

The payment methods are the same.  In Africa each country has a different mobile payment method.  

African consumers are used to doing everything on their mobile phones.  As compared to the developed world where it is the millennials and 16-34 year olds that are using their phone to access the internet more than a PC, in Africa this is the norm for all age groups.  Your granny is just as likely to use and pay with M-Pesa as your teenager is.  They all know how to use it.  In some markets two thirds of the population access the internet using their mobile phones as opposed to a PC.

As the gap closes between emerging markets and developed markets, the opportunity for eCommerce and mCommerce companies is limitless.    

African Payment Solutions, a global gateway hosted in the Amazon Cloud, is now focusing on getting multinational eCommerce companies paid in local currency and payment methods simply and economically.  Developed market payment gateway expertise combined with local market solutions.  

M-Pesa for online payment in Kenya and local debit card in Nigeria.  At this stage don’t bother with credit card in either of these two if you want to bring local consumers onto the net.

Our thanks to http://dazeinfo.com/2015/07/20/what-does-growth-in-emerging-markets-mean-for-e-commerce/ for their content inspiration