Gbolahan Fagbure, co-founder of online grocery store Supermart.ng, says Lagos is responsible for at least 80% of ecommerce sales in the West African country and why most ecommerce ventures are not yet planning further expansion.

In an exclusive interview with ITWeb Africa, Fagbure, whose company is only operating in selected parts of Lagos, said the nation's capital city of Abuja and the popular city of Port Harcourt only account for about 7% of ecommerce sales in the country, while the rest of Nigeria is contributing just 13%.

"If this is the present situation, we see no reason why we should be moving to other cities when the lion share of the market is here in Lagos," he said.

Supermart.ng is not the only the ecommerce company that is recording most of its sales from this region.

Chris Folayan, co-CEO of MallforAfrica, a platform that allows Nigerians to shop at the major international stores, confirms that many of the company's customers are located in Lagos.

Speaking to ITWeb Africa from California, Folayan said while Lagos accounts for most of the orders, the number of orders from other cities is steadily growing. "Lagos is the biggest but Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan and others are steadily growing. There is no month that we have fewer orders than the previous month in any of Nigeria's major cities where we are getting orders from."

A tech analyst at Jumia Nigeria, who did not want to be named, also revealed that in addition to Lagos being the sector's most active city, it is also the most diverse as both corporate and individual clients shop in large volumes. "It is no longer about encouraging people to buy online since many of the big companies in Lagos have already opened up to ecommerce. We have many major companies that order through our platform and the list continues to grow. But this is not the case in other cities as the corporate world seems to still be reluctant to embrace new ways of shopping maybe because they still don't trust the system or are not comfortable with its transparency," the analyst commented.

Economist Sayo Olumuyiwa said Lagos will continue to out-perform other Nigerian cities in all forms of economic indices and commerce.

He said: "Let me put it this way – out of every NGN100 spent in Nigeria, NGN90 is spent in Lagos. All the major companies are headquartered in Lagos, the economy of the city is bigger than that of many African countries put together and the city's ever-growing population makes it one of the cities to watch globally. It is not just ecommerce – it's any form of commerce."