I’ve had a lot of interactions with people and from their response , its safe to say that marketplace is doing more harm than good to Jumia & Konga.
The reason why people don’t use them is not lack of trust but because of the believe that their products are more expensive than offline stores.
So you hear people say “Jumia very expensive” , “Konga is more expensive than Jumia” , “They’re both expensive” , blah blah blah. But the truth is , people don’t know that Konga & Jumia have adopted the middle man role and are no longer the direct sellers of most products.
Let me use this analogy
The recommended retail price for a product is #49,999
Merchant A sells it for #50,000
Merchant B sells it for #51,000
Merchant C sells it for #54,000
Merchant D sells it for #56,000
Visitor x visits the E-commerce site at X period of time , but Merchant A and B are already sold out (because of their price) , leaving Merchant C and D behind.
Visitor x visits the nearby store and got the device for #50,000. At that point , Visitor x believes the E-commerce site is very expensive and should not be patronized.
So there is a need for E-commerce sites to regulate the price at which merchant sell their products.
It’s a free market, I don’t think there could ever be a situation were product prices will be regulated because you don’t know what conditions merchant C or D gets their product.
@kelz. No there is no “need for E-commerce sites to regulate the price at which merchant sell their products”. Just like you mentioned, Konga and Jumia are simply marketplaces where merchants set their own prices for their wares and Jumia/Konga are simply facilitators of the transactions.
Each merchant sets their prices based on their costs and their profit expectations (and in some cases, competitors’ prices) so if the merchant chooses to price their wares too high and do not get any sales due to that, that is not and should not be Jumia or Konga’s business. At the end of the day, it comes down to the customers to decide if they want to buy at the higher price or wait till the price comes down to a point which they are comfortable with.
It’s like saying if you go to a physical market and a certain trader chooses to sell his/her wares at 1.5 times the price of the competitiors, someone should go and force him/her to reduce prices comparatively to other traders.
You should not expect prices of items to be same as offline stores because Konga, Jumia etc charge Merchants as high as 20% commission on each item sold and Konga also charges monthly fees. Note that even in the offline market, prices are not the same. Customers decide which items to buy based on the affordability. Nobody also regulates prices offline.