5 Things about Making Money as an Online Vendor in Nigeria

Posted on January 27, 2025

Selling a product online as a business or individual is a good way to make money with ease without too much upfront capital. With the ever increasing internet penetration in Nigeria you have a very large pool of potential customers to sell to. While the opportunities are immense there are a couple of things you should take note of so not to get tripped up

Paying for Ads

There are various alternatives to build a following you can market your product to, and recommend either Tik-Tok or Instagram because a lot of consumers there accustomed to online shopping. With frequent engaging posts designed to inform, and have no direct intent to sell something you can grow your audience within 10 to 15 months on Tik-Tok. A lot longer on Instagram without a definite timeline as Facebook will want you to frequently pay to boost your posts for a larger reach.

If are not the patient type and want fast growth especially on Instagram then you have to be ready to pay to boost your posts for a larger reach that will lead to engagement that provides likes, and new followers. There’s also the alternative of pushing for direct sales via promoting your product with adverts to get new orders from customers, which can be achieved with Facebook ads.

Customers

Online shoppers from Nigeria will push you to your emotional limits, the stories are endless and not for the faint hearted but you can make things a lot easier for yourself if your patient to build a large audience, and persuade them with incentives to pay upfront to validate orders before delivery.

The reason online shoppers in Nigeria will cause you to almost question your sanity is because the norm of online shopping in Nigeria is to pay for goods on receipt which over years has left a large leeway for a lot of shenanigans that can put you out of business if left unchecked.

Payment Options

Ideally you will love that customers pay you upfront before you process their orders, and you can stand your ground on this if you have built a large audience that know you well enough but the reality is over 70% of the orders, you’ll get will be from customers requesting pay on delivery.

If you’re running ads for direct product sales, all your orders will be pay on delivery don’t bother fighting against it, can cause unscrupulous individuals to report your account which could lead to it being pulled down without notice or your ads paused. This is not a cause for concern if you’re a Streetzwyze vendor as you can easily verify serious customers, and achieve a much higher fulfillment success rate.

Fulfillment

If you plan on outsourcing logistics you will suffer from high delivery costs, communication bottlenecks and poor fulfillment rate that will lead to lost orders, and in worst cases unrecoverable receivables because the dispatch “jappa ” with your money or product. To effectively manage fulfillment strongly advised you put the investment in building your own system, refining your process and getting the required asset or form a partnership with a delivery agent.

You can start with just 1 person within your fleet or agent and grow as orders build up. This will give you full control to manage costs, and ensure optimal delivery times for orders within proximity to where you’re based. In the event of out-of-state deliveries bear with the slight inconvenience and do the delivery yourself or delegate to an agent you have built a strong relationship with if you can’t get payment upfront to waybill.

Keeping Records

If your strictly viewing eCommerce as a side hustle then you are under estimating the potential of it to give you the freedom and security a thriving business can provide, so build a team around you and track everything. Cost associated with fulfillment, adverts, procurement should be monitored to ensure every successful order delivers a profit margin that is always robust. You can rely on free tools like Zoho, Pipedrive, HubSpot to achieve this.