In 2019, I wrote about Copia: ‘This is the most potent ecommerce model in Africa at the moment; Copia is on a mission…. Largely, Copia is a consumer goods catalog and delivery service for Base of the Pyramid consumers in the developing world. It leverages mobile technologies and a network of agents serving as distribution points of aggregation to make a wide range of quality goods accessible to rural and peri-urban consumers.
‘Through this mechanism, Copia has fixed the marginal cost problem, and that makes its model supreme. It does everything through aggregation which means it can pursue a near-zero marginal cost in its scaling.’
Today, Copia just raised $50 million to begin that scaling: “Kenyan B2C e-commerce company Copia Global has raised $50 million in a Series C equity round led by Goodwell Investments.”
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What it does looks like agency banking: “The agent network model allows customers to choose how they interact with Copia – online or offline. The e-commerce company pays agents a commission on every sold product, increasing their income by more than 30%. And of the 30,000 agents of the company, 77% are women”.
“Copia’s e-commerce model is built for the unique requirements of the African market and will save many Africans a lot of time and money. We see it as one of the next big leapfrogging technologies; just like mobile phones leapfrogged landlines and solar power leapfrogged the grid, Copia is leapfrogging retail,” Els Boerhof, the managing partner at Goodwell Investments, said in a statement.
Now you know the B2C ecommerce model that is working in Africa. Here, humans are the postal service systems, the shops, the platforms, etc through an orchestration powered by technology, removing all elements of marginal cost challenges.
If you are checking why I called this B2C company the best in Africa, read this line from the TechCrunch piece:”… Western-style e-commerce companies such as Jumia operate unprofitably. The African e-commerce giant has not turned a profit since going public as its losses continue to increase. “Copia, on the other hand, runs a profitable business because of how it approaches the market. The e-commerce company focuses on customers in rural areas that struggle to access the same goods and services in terms of choice, price value and reliability that similar consumers in urban areas or of higher income levels can access.” Yes, the company is profitable unlike peers which run the Amazon-like business model in the continent.
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The model is viable, and it can also help in the fight against fake and substandard products. The supply system in this part of the world is totally broken, you cannot really trace where what you purchase is coming from, even when it carries labels of well-known brands.
So many players can play in this space, and once it’s popularized, many things that are broken in our commerce sector will disappear.
Tech remains the great leveler.