Nigerian eCommerce giant, Konga has reportedly laid off over 60% of its workforce, in what seems to be a move to drastically reduce operational costs.
According to Quartz, “CEO Shola Adekoya informed staff of the cuts yesterday November 30 and said the company will adopt a leaner business model”. There are also speculations that founding ex-CEO Sim Shagaya may be returning to his role, from which stepped down almost 2 years go.
While there is no official statement about the massive layoff, Shola Adekoya alluded to an “internal restructuring” in a recent Medium post in which he also happened to announce another major decision; Konga is shifting to a prepay-only model, essentially putting a stop to Pay on Delivery (PoD).
“In recent years,” said Shola, “we have explored several solutions for payment and e-commerce in Nigeria and concluded that prepay is a necessary approach for our business and the market.”
He penned down the decision to the “cost of inflation and increasing challenges of managing payment-on-delivery, as well as the resulting level of order cancellations on the platform”.
Konga is not the first major eCommerce platform in Nigeria to attempt to kill the monster that is PoD. Following the tragic murdering of a Jumia delivery man in Port Harcourt, Payporte drew first blood in April, by suspending PoD almost 2 years behind schedule. Soon enough, Jumia itself followed suit, albeit with a partial implementation.
Beyond the layoffs and elimination of PoD, Konga will also be ending it warehousing service for merchants.
Culled from Here
