My Personal Experience with Dropshipping in East Africa in 2019.
By: Edeh Alikaya
Tags: Africa, Trade, Ecommerce, Dropshipping, Online Shopping

Source:bgdblog.org

I first heard about dropshipping in mid-2017. I was pursuing bachelors in engineering and my goals were completely different back then. But by late 2018, I had enrolled on a few courses and was setting up my first dropshipping store. The prospects are high and just like every other business, I am filled with excitement at the beginning.

Dropshipping can be carried out anywhere in the world that is one of its best benefits as a business. Dropshipping platforms are easy to come by such as Oberlo and CJDropshipping. All you need is a computer or your mobile device, good access to the internet, good network of product/s suppliers if you are running store with various products and good knowledge of how to scale the market and run profitable/convertible ads. P.S copywriting is a skill you wouldn’t want to go without. Your whole online reputation depends on it, right from the store front, to the product pages and then to the ads. ‘I see lots of boring ads, don’t be one of those people,’ my mentor always said.

Source:oberlo.com

I started off with a few of these skills; there was no way to have them all at once. I practiced and studied and put everything I learned into my store. Since my store was low budget means I couldn’t afford to hire any professional assistance. I relied on myself and my online teachers. Well for starters I could say, I really worked my ass off to see that store look profession. Every day a new lesson on design and graphic or product sourcing or something had to be implemented. Everything was going just fine. I launched my store and I was up there ready for the really work to begin. Now I skipped the part of testing my store till after I launched it. It was a big mistake. That was when I found out I couldn’t buy through my store.

Now I didn’t know it was a well-known fact PayPal only permits you to send money out of Uganda but you can’t receive any money in the country. In 2019, that’s where PayPal stands with a country like Uganda. I was irate and very disappointed. You might be asking why I took the risk to start my store with only one payment processor but I have no line of defense here. Shopify provides lots of payment processors but when it comes to most African countries our choices aren’t the best.

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Truth be told, I believe Shopify is one of the best e-commerce solutions ever made. It is easy to use, with pre-designed store themes and every simple tweaks to personalize it. Absolutely genius. Everything is usually straight forward and whenever I got lost or confused, they pull through with excellent customer care.

Shopify payment gateways for Uganda.

However, choices like the above BitPay and Coinbase are very limiting. I am no fan of cryptocurrencies and so are many people. I don’t even know one person who uses Bitcoins let alone fully trusts it. No matter how sophisticated they make those e-wallets seem, you are an ever-so-ready target for hackers you can’t even trace. And for ecommerce, an offline payment gateway defies the concept that it stands on entirely. Who would want to buy something online then when it comes to payment, he/she has to go to western union agent line up in a long queue to make payment? It makes no sense. ecommerce is supposed to remove the hurdles of tradition trade not reinforce it.

In the end, I took the only way out. I had to partner with someone who doesn’t live in Uganda or in Africa entirely. A very close friend of mine was willing to partner with me and that’s how my store is now based somewhere in the E.U.

Since then, I personally wondered how many people had a liking for dropshipping but had to give up because of the same reason. The business model would have been amazing for their products but the challenge to even sell their products anywhere else other than home is tremendous. What a loss! An Ankara dress maker in Nairobi cannot sell her products to a potential customer in Spain because she cannot get find the easiest and most convenient way for her customer to pay her. Hence diving into dropshipping in Africa is a hassle. The challenge of finding reliable payment gateways in the most of the continent is real.

· But what is keeping investors away from closing this gap?

It is true starting a payment processing company is not easy. Obtaining the software and hardware mayn’t be tough, but having a big network of excellent around the clock engineers and sales people to keep that company afloat would be the big challenge. However I still don’t think it is not achievable. With the right startup costs, anything is possible. However something else still holds most investors back, not from dropshipping or ecommerce but from inter-border trade in general…….transportation.

‘Poor transportation infrastructure often equals to high transportation costs in trade.’

Most sellers/producers/wholesalers cannot get their products to their customers around the continent efficiently. If the absence of good transportation in Africa has crippled traditional trade for so long then Ecom in itself stands no chance. We cannot realize its full potential where we can’t even reach 50% of the market. The cost of transporting something from Ghana to Uganda might be twice the cost of the item itself. Personally I can’t remember the times I have wanted to buy something online but when we get to the basis of my location, we both give up on the idea. The high costs of available transportation means, presence of sub optimal modes and poor infrastructure in most regions have limited trade and development.

We can’t have nice things over here, till we fix the transportation/connectivity problem in the continent.

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