Consumer traffic to Jumia Kenya dropped by 0.5 million in the last 12 months slowing the performance of Kenya in the Africa region as orders rose by an impressive 40 per cent.

Data from Alexa, a website traffic analytics platform shows that Jumia’s traffic dropped to 2.5 million from 3 million as Jiji upped competition to grow its traffic from 1.5 million monthly visitors in the last one year to 2.5 million monthly visitors.

Jumia’s performance is largely driven by South Africa and Nigeria with Kenya and Ghana struggling to catch up.

However the dip in traffic was compensated by marked meaningful acceleration, quarterly active consumers, and orders which reached all-time highs of 3.8 million, 11.3 million and $330 million respectively, increasing by 29 per cent, 40 per cent and 20 per cent year-over-year respectively.

Shore up performance

The company moved to allow instalment payments in Kenya and launched electric bike deliveries in Kenya to shore up performance.

“We also rolled out instalments for the first time in Nigeria and Kenya in partnership with banks. Jumia, in conjunction with eBee Africa, piloted the use of electric bicycles for deliveries in Nairobi, Kenya,” the company said.

It means the new Jumia CEO Betty Mwangi will have a short honeymoon at the corner office as competition and low penetration shows Jumia Kenya the short end of the stick.

Jumia replaced Kenya CEO Sam Chapati with former Britam Commercial Director Betty Mwangi perhaps in an indication of hard times at the online retail firm.

“I look forward to expanding the Jumia universe and trust that my experience and passion for digital innovation will help to propel Jumia to greater heights,” the former M-Pesa boss Ms Mwangi said earlier.

The changes come at a time when Jumia posted an increase in losses for the last quarter of 2021 as investors sold the stock.

Nigeria based Jiji which allows anyone to post goods and services for sale has continued to consolidate traffic as the online marketplaces continue to struggle.

The choppy e-commerce waters have seen the exit of Kilimall and Masoko which were once major contenders.

Jumia had moved to strike partnership deals with Carrefour in order to piggyback on the dominant physical stores but the deal had not borne traffic. Jiji’s deal with Tuskys also foundered after the Supermarket crashed.

Naivas the leading physical retail store has launched its own online retail platform and has partnered with delivery firm Glovo to ship its products to consumers.

Glovo has signed a deal with Java House Africa, Zucchini Greengrocers and Onn the way Supermarkets.

Online shopping

A recent survey by Mastercard shows that only 4 per cent of Kenyans primarily use the internet for online shopping compared to 52 per cent in South Africa.

Jumia has also opened its delivery services to third parties to in order to cut the cost of operations to the demanding and labour intensive delivery business.

The NYSE listed startup exited several African countries including Tanzania and Rwanda to remain with South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.

The Mastercard data shows that Kenya has one of the lowest proportions of online shoppers in Africa.