Interswitch joins Nigeria’s $17bn e-commerce market with Quickteller Business
Interswitch-owned Quickteller has become the latest entrant in the Nigerian ecommerce market estimated at $17 billion.
The payment unit announced on Wednesday the launch of Quickteller Business a platform that allows customers to set up their business online in minutes at no cost. As soon as the store is set up, the business is able to access other benefits such as electronic invoicing to customers; payment links to help merchants accept payments without a website; from anyone, anywhere, anytime; multiple payment channels including web, ATM, POS, QR, USSD, and more.
Other benefits include a free mini e-commerce store; a userfriendly reporting dashboard to aid business decisions; free, and easy integration to any platform or plugin of the merchants, both mobile and web; faster payment confirmation and easier reconciliation of revenue from multiple channels.
The announcement has been in the oven since 2020. BusinessDay reported in December that Interswitch alongside Unified Payments were making plans to launch e-commerce businesses.
The launch of Quickteller Business swells the number of fintech companies that are newly playing in the market already dominated by the likes of Jumia. Jumia, the only e-commerce player listed on the US Stock exchange is also planning to expand its share of the market after it raised $243 million by selling 7.9 million shares at an average price of $30.51 in December.
“The evolution of our payment and e-commerce offerings into Quickteller Business represents a significant longterm shift in both our business and merchant operating model,” Akeem Lawal, Divisional Chief Executive Officer, Payments Processing at Interswitch Group, said in a statement.
The year 2020 would likely go down as the year e-commerce made a resurgence in Nigeria. Prior to then, the market saw a lot of exits from established players like OLX, Gloo, Opay, Dealdey, among others. Konga struggled for years and had to sell to an investor, Zinox, for cheap.
The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic brought a shift in spending attitude. Due to the lockdown it imposed, many customers found themselves opting for online stores instead of open markets. That trend is expected to continue as more internet investments push the price of internet data downward.
Payment gateway companies Paystack and Flutterwave joined the market in the second quarter of 2020. Facebook has also released its Marketplace feature in 2021.
As far back as 2017, Quickteller made it known what its ambitions were in the Nigerian payment market. Then, the company said it was targeting not less than N450 billion of the N6 trillion electronic payment market in Nigeria. Achieving that number would mean controlling a share of the 497,000 people in Nigeria who are actively using apps to buy airtime, transfer money and pay bills, and the 29.2 million active cards that would likely be used to make purchases on the stores that would be created on Quickteller Business.