Jumia announced this years Black Friday saw a 30% growth in value of goods sold on its platform

E-commerce in Africa is rapidly expanding, and its potential remains enormous as more people gain access to the internet. According to the 2021 GSMA mobile economy report, 303 million people, or about 28 percent of the population, are connected to the mobile internet in Sub-Saharan Africa, and this figure is expected to rise to 40 percent in three years.

As the number of people who have access to the internet grows and more people choose to buy goods online, e-commerce platforms are likely to see an increase in the number of orders placed and the value of goods purchased, as Jumia recently experienced.

According to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) report released on Tuesday by the pan-African e-commerce platform, the value of goods sold on its platform during the Black Friday season increased by 30 percentage points this year to reach $150 million.

Jumia’s Black Friday sales began in 2012 and run from the first Friday of November to the end of the month. Orders increased by 39 percentage points to 4.3 million during that time period, while the number of Jumia merchants increased by 11 percentage points to 46,000. Jumia also had 40 million unique visitors, a 27 percent increase over the previous year.

Consumables were the most popular products on the site, followed by beauty and fashion items, as previously reported. This comes after the e-commerce platform opened more dark stores to expand its grocery category, which appears to be paying off according to Q3 results, but profitability for the NYSE-listed firm remains elusive.

“Our consumers are increasingly turning to Jumia for their everyday needs,” Jumia said in an SEC filing. “The top three fastest growing physical goods categories in volume terms are fast moving consumer goods (‘FMCG,’ followed by beauty and fashion.”

In a previous interview with TechCrunch, Jumia attributed the shift in shopping habits to stay-at-home restrictions, which fueled the need for online shopping, as well as the younger population, which is quick to adopt new trends, and the continent’s increasing smartphone and internet penetration. Smartphones drive the most traffic to the e-commerce site (75 percent), implying that as more people become connected, the number of online shoppers will grow. The majority of Jumia’s online sales are made in Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya.

Jumia Logistics, the company’s delivery service, handled 5.3 million packages during the Black Friday season, which Jumia said was “more than double the average monthly package volume in the first ten months of 2021.”

Jumia is currently Africa’s largest e-commerce platform, outpacing hundreds of others such as Nigeria’s Marketplace Africa and South Africa’s Souq and bidorbuy. The e-commerce platform is currently available in 11 African markets, including Algeria, Senegal, Tunisia, Ivory Coast, Uganda, and Morocco.