E-commerce platform Jumia has launched its portal in South Africa.

E-commerce platform Jumia has launched its portal in South Africa to provide consumers with access to essential products.

According to Jumia the portal will provide a steady supply of hygiene and sanitary products such as diapers, soap bars, disinfectants, and liquid hand wash.

“It will also enable brands and vendors of essential products to reach consumers at a time where distribution in retail is challenging,” the company added.

Dettol, Harpic (Reckitt Benckiser), Pampers, Always, Arie & Gillette (Procter & Gamble) are among the brands who have joined forces with Jumia in order to enable the launch of the platform.

The e-commerce site will leverage the existing infrastructure of fashion focused online retailer Zando, a subsidiary of Jumia Technologies AG, the parent company of Jumia.

Sacha Poignonnec, co-CEO of Jumia, said, “We are proud to extend our Jumia operations to South Africa and to offer a safer shopping solution both to vendors and consumers. In times of crisis, it is our mission to innovate together with our partners in order to bring solutions to our consumers.”

Grant Brown, CEO of Jumia & Zando in South Africa, added: “We will leverage on Zando infrastructure to contribute to making essential products accessible and affordable to all consumers in South Africa. We want to thank Reckitt Benckiser, Procter & Gamble, as well as the other brands and vendors who have spontaneously partnered with us in this effort and we welcome all other providers o to join us.”

The company also stated that it has taken additional measures to keep consumers, delivery agents and partners safe in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.

It said: “Jumia will insure ‘contactless’ deliveries for prepaid packages. Jumia’s delivery agents have been trained to enforce necessary standards: when they arrive at the customer’s place and drop off the package at their doorstep, then step back to the safe distance limit and will wait for the customer to take the package before leaving.”

E-commerce on the rise

Media outlets continue to talk about an e-commerce boom amid the Coronavirus outbreak.

TechCabal reported that global consumer internet group and major tech investor Naspers’ stock price has risen by 11% since 2020 began, its best quarterly performance in a year.

“Demand for the digital products and services offered by Chinese company, Tencent in which Naspers has a 31% stake, has spiked because of the pandemic. Prosus NV, the Johannesburg-listed company that holds the Tencent stake has also risen by 17%. Visitors on popular Chinese workplace chat apps including Tencent Conference have grown proportionally to the number of coronavirus cases,” according to the publication.

The global health crisis is also expected to drive up the use of mobile money platforms and number of mobile transactions.

The GSM Association (GSMA) affirmed this in its annual ‘State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money’ 2019 marked a major milestone for the mobile money industry, with over one billion registered accounts and close to US$2-billion in daily transactions.

For the first time, digital transactions represented the majority, 57%, of mobile money interactions.

The GSMA adds that the industry is witnessing increasing user trust and relevance. With 290 live services in 95 countries and 372 million active accounts, mobile money is entering the mainstream and becoming the path to financial inclusion in most low-income countries.