In the emerging world, no great ecommerce company has been birthed without a payment solution; pick India’s Flipkart with PhonePe, and China’s Alibaba with Alipay. You can flip that construct: it would be hard for any paytech company to live sustainably in the developing world if your strategy is simply to win checkout pages of companies. Yes, dropping your lines of codes on websites of merchants cannot take you to the mountaintop.
The path to growth is simple: you must control the pipelines of transactions. That was what made OPay a formidable player with its amalgam of bikers, before it was muted by a change in Lagos state’s regulation. OPay was generating tons of transactions, $10 million a day, through the clusters of activities like loss-making ride hailing in its ecosystems. I have called that strategy a Double Play Strategy: you earn competitive positioning in tangential things which may not be evident to direct competitors. Competing against OPay as a fintech without compensating for the huge transaction funnels via ride hailing would end badly.
Today, we are learning that Flutterwave has unveiled Flutterwave Store. That is a brilliant move. Simply, the company and its partners will handle your deliveries (in some markets) while you focus on making sales after listing your products in the digital store.
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Flutterwave Store is quite simply the best and easiest way to launch and manage an e-commerce business that accepts payments from anywhere in the world without creating a website, knowing how to code etc.
Flutterwave Store allows you to upload products, set prices and (in some markets) have our integrated delivery partners pick up when you have an order and deliver to your customer. “Buy Online, Pickup Curbside” store if you like.
Do not look far: Flutterwave has now an ecommerce marketplace. Yes, it has a double play since it can funnel transactions into its own payment solution, making it a better company. The launch of Flutterwave Store elevates the company as it can now defend its castle through leverageable moats, built on merchants and store business owners. This provides the company a stronger competitive positioning, away from the hardest job in paytech – competing for checkout pages of websites.
We use Flutterwave on this site. It is an amazing product – they keep making it better. Yesterday, we had a 100% transaction success, implying that all the people who tried to pay went through! Provided that percentage stays at triple digit, we will gladly keep paying our “tax” to it.
Flutterwave’s promise to deliver the items means that great things are on the horizon for merchants and small business owners. Of course, the company has to manage the risks well since logistics is a very expensive business in Africa as scale does not necessarily reduce marginal cost. The implication is that you can just be raking loses in the process. Yet, if the loss is compensated by the “taxes” collected on paytech commission, you can upgrade the size of the party hall!
Flutterwave 2.0 – using ecommerce to play a double play on fintech. This is a new company, across all metrics, because it can create a virtuoso circle and a positive continuum that will empower communities as it ramps up. Gaskiya!
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Well, creating a marketplace within its payment system may not really offer any decent advantage to Fluttawave, rather the quality of merchants and consumers is where the biggest difference lies.
The iPhone users still watch Netflix, rather than being satisfied with AppleTV. There’s still plenty work ahead for Flutterwave, the new territory takes no prisoners; it’s quite different from sitting back and collecting payment taxes…