Hello Radar community. This is Tunde and with me is Ercin, We’re the ACE guys. We founded the company to solve logistics and enable commerce across Africa. We’re excited to be here. Ask us anything! 
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This post will be open for questions by 4pm. Tunde and Ercin will start answering by 5pm. See you then.
Okay Radar community. Drop your questions. Tunde and Ercin will be around by 5pm to start answering them.
Glad you could join us @tunde_kehinde and @ercin_eksin
I’m gonna dive in right away, deep waters. People have been talking about pay-on-delivery a lot lately. About how it’s the devil. Others say it was necessary. You guys are arguably the co-pioneers of the method during your stints at Jumia alongside Konga, and now you are doing pure-play logistics where you obviously have to deal with the issue everyday. It would be great to get some insight into how your thinking about pay-on-delivery has evolved over the years, and how you approach it now.
Some context:
Hello guys!
I want to say you’ve got a wonderful customer care team. They responded to my enquiries within minutes after I sent an email to do some findings. Nice work and thumbs up to you both.
My question are as follows:
Do you have a working model for supporting startup eCommerce companies with their logistics considering cost and quality of service?
Do you ship heavy equipment like tractors and the likes? Just asking incase you have a customer who might need that service.
When you deliver goods on behalf of your customers, how long does it take to remit such monies to the merchants that signed up with you. I mean for goods that are paid on delivery?
How are your charges like? Are they based on the weight or the number of items shipped at a time?
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Hello Tunde/Ercin. Nice job guys. ]It’s general concensus that delivery and logistics is the bane of ecommerce in Nigeria. What made you confident that a courier business would thrive? Was it your contacts and network base? Or your inside industry knowledge? I know these all played into it, but what convinced you that logsitics and courier services was a project worth embarking on? I’ve always been curious about how entrepreneurs make big decisions like these?
If am not wrong, like Konga, and Jumia, you also receive payment on behalf of your clients - whether in cash, or through POS at point of delivery, my question is, how do you remit, and what are your charges for doing so?
Hi All, its Tunde here. Looking forward to the session!. Great questions @lordbanks
To be honest, I believe there is nothing wrong or unique with pay on delivery for 2 main reasons.
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We use pay on delivery as part of our everyday lives – ie to pay for your meal, to pay your tailor, etc. Consumers want to pay for a service when it is completed and customers will always use the payment channel that is most convenient for them. As a consumer facing business, the reality is you need to offer a world class service on pay-on-delivery, prepayment and soon escrow. Until there is more trust that when I buy online, my item will come (or my money will come back), no questions asked…pay-on-delivery is here to stay
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Pay-On-Delivery jump started eCommerce in Nigeria. It removed the barrier for consumers to buy online. After the consumer tries your service the first time, I believe they are more open to pre-paying for the next purchase…assuming the experience is amazing…ie the right item came on time, you had the order in stock, the delivery guy was polite, etc…if not…they’ll keep using pay-on-delivery.
Our role at ACE (www.ace.ng) is to be the bridge between merchants that want to sell and consumers that want to purchase what they want, receive the item when they want it and pay in the manner this wish.
We offer our merchants and the customer full transparency on where their package is, when it will get delivered and the amount of payments we are collecting and will remit for them. With Interswtich we will soon offer more solutions to facilitate payments (pre-paid and post-paid for eCommerce)
Hi @IBKTheBot…good question. whenever I get this question, I try to apply a framework of 1. how big is the market 2. what is the problem you are trying to solve and 3. do you have the team to solve it.
One of the biggest problems we see in eCommerce / retail in general is how do you literally get an item from A to B in a market where the road network is bad, addressing is not consistent and it is literally (extremely) tough to find the customer. We chose logistics because….
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Huge Market. We believe eCommerce will be significant part of our economy soon…in a lot of developed markets…eCommerce is up to 6% of GDP.if you take a conservative assumption (2% potential for Nigeria)…this market could be worth $10 Billion USD soon…
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Big Challenges. However, eCommerce will not scale without a network that allows goods to move from a to b in a deterministic fashion, with real-time tracking and world class payments solutions.
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Great Team. We believe we are uniquely positioned to capture this market given the strength of our team. (close to 100 rock stars), top-notch investors and partners…plus Nigerians are taking to eCommerce more and more daily.
Now is the time to move!
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Thanks a lot for the nice words. Our team really appreciates your feedback.
Regarding your points
My question is that I want to know if you have a working model for supporting startup eCommerce companies with their logistics considering cost and quality of service.
We currently serve around 300 merchants and most of them are SMEs that are in the eCommerce space. Our pricing model and high successful delivery rate allowed our merchants to grow their business.
Do you ship heavy equipment like tractors and the likes? Just asking incase you have a customer who might need that service.
Not yet. We are currently focusing on the goods that consumers need on a regular basis that are generally up to 100kg. We will definitely serve to move larger goods in the future.
When you deliver goods on behalf of your customers, how long does it take to remit such monies to the merchants that signed up with you. I mean for goods that are paid on delivery?
We understand that working capital is very important for SMEs to grow their business therefore we remit the funds that we collect on behalf of our merchants in T+2 business days i.e we deliver a package and collect the money on Tuesday; we remit to our merchant on Thursday
How are your charges like? Are they based on the weight or the number of items shipped at a time?
You can always reach us at genius@ace.ng. Our client managers will share our rate card with you and explain our processes to you. They are based on weight, the destination and couple of other factors. We focus on growing our merchants because as they grow we grow as well. Therefore, we introduced a new pricing model in Nigeria that we make most of our fees when we successfully deliver a package
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@lanreode
That’s right, we collect money on behalf of our clients. Our platform allows them to sell across multiple platforms and consolidate all of their proceedings through ACE. We deliver the packages that they sold through multiple platforms i.e Konga, their own platform and remit in T+2 business days to the bank account of the client.
Regarding our fees, you can always reach us at genius@ace.ng. Our client managers will share our rate card with you and explain our processes to you.
@ercin_eksin @tunde_kehinde
Thanks for your replies. I’ll get in touch with your client Managers as you have just advised.
keep up the good work guys.
Hey guys! Cool stuff with ACE and going head on to solve the biggest issue with ecommerce and online retail - logistics.
So I’ve got this startup and we buy meals from different restaurants and deliver to customers. Is there a place where ACE can partner with such a startup. ACE handles all the pick-ups, delivery, payment and everything in between that is logistics so I can focus on getting more restaurants on board as well as more customers to order meals?
Keyword being ‘startup’, it’d have to be a post-paid type of partnership where ACE gets paid upon remitting collected monies.
@tunde_kehinde @ercin_eksin Ah, that actually reminds me. Someone’s words in another Radar topic
Their words:
I have thought of ACE - they seem too corporate
Are y’all too corporate? 
There’s quite a few small merchants looking to outsource their logistics, and it would seem that some are having difficulty finding the right provider for their scale.
Hi Tunde and Ercin, stellar job up at ACE.
Are you experimenting with new ways to make deliveries? Perhaps something like Amazon’s futuristic drone delivery.
Hi @nubikayode
That’s why we are here! As Ercin mentioned we handle delivery for a variety of different customers, everything from fast food to consumers goods to electronics, fashion, local stuffs (garri) etc.
Happy to help. Please send your details (what you want to ship, where you want to ship it to, how many you want to ship a day) to genius@ace.ng and we’ll do the rest from there.
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@gbenga Not yet at drones!..but we will be releasing a lot of world-class technology aimed at giving extremely detailed transparency to our merchants and customers on their deliveries soon…stay tuned!
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Very interesting point. I would give a bit of insight of our demographics to start with. Actually, Tunde and I are the pretty much the oldest guys at ACE at the age of 32. Our team is all young Nigerians that grew up in Nigeria or came back to Nigeria to give back to their country.
Regarding our processes, our focus has always been the end customer. We clearly observed around the world that the companies that succeed in eCommerce in the long term are the ones that provide the best customer experience. Logistics is a very particular industry such that you are only as good as your last delivery. Therefore, we built a lot of processes and invested a lot in our technology to provide a transparent and consistent experience to the end customers which enabled us to grow significantly. I guess all that process and technology might make us seem too cooperate compared to other players in the industry but we really love and enjoy what we do.
Looking forward to those:
- Is ACE profitable? If I can dare it; how much did ACE make last year?
- What are some specific vulnerabilities you have noticed and plugged in your operations in the last 2 years.