Will farmers and agro-dealers use an e-commerce platform to buy and sell agricultural inputs?

Launching a brand new category for agricultural products on Konga.com’s e-commerce platform was never going to be easy.

Technology is often seen as the bridge that consolidates and magically solves challenges that hinder progress. Nevertheless, we have learnt that in most parts of rural Nigeria, factors such as fixed mind-sets, poor or no access to basic infrastructure, and digital literacy can hinder a process that would have been smooth sailing.

The Onboarding Process

Our assumption that leveraging the use of tech to build a successful ecosystem in the agricultural sector was tested during the onboarding phase of this pilot. Based on a successful collation of a list of about 20 Agro-dealers, through our close collaboration with the Niger State, the Nigerian Agricultural Input Dealers Association (NAIDA) — Mr. Patrick Esogban, and some other key players in the sector, we set out to onboard the merchants onto the Konga portal.

A process that would have been seamless, if the parties involved were tech-savvy. We reached a deadlock as most of the agro-dealers were unable to meet our basic criteria for our backend team to successfully transition their business to our online domain. Hence, we uncovered that there was little or no digital literacy among middle-aged to elderly men that govern the agro-dealership business space.

The following challenges were the most frequent;

• Poor/No digital literacy: Agro-dealers lack access to a smartphone or computer, which leaves them excluded from the digital world.
• Agro dealers are not keen to transition their business operations to new media which is unfamiliar to them.
• Distance between agro-dealers’ locations and existing Konga collection centers for onward delivery; this meant that agro-dealers incurred greater delivery costs and left agro-dealers out of pocket when products were returned by the customer
• Availability of products: as the planting season was already coming to an end and some agro-dealers did not have many inputs left in stock.

Our Findings

The feedback from the field made us analyze these existing challenges. We tried to devise ingenious methods that could mitigate them.

For instance, realizing that sharing the required standard product images, using the right background and lighting was going to be a problem, we hired a local photographer to take the photos of their products that would be displayed on our website.

Secondly, part of our standard operating procedure at Konga for onboarding suppliers is to attend an online training on Thursdays on the step by step, sign up process. Their unwillingness to participate in this, made us ease up this process and try to be as flexible as possible. We tried other means such as a group call and providing some of the merchants we were trying to onboard like Yardstick Associates, ABC Seeds, and Goldagric Nigeria Limited with a dedicated account manager who would oversee the process.

Goldgric Nigeria Limited is one of the first merchants to come onboard from Niger state and the Manager is currently a very active merchant. He confirmed to us the challenge with dropping products off at our drop-off location where delivery is eventually made to our customers because of the distance. Hence, as part of our way to ensure merchant and customer satisfaction, we had to come up with a way to provide a special pick-up and delivery service for him. This means once there is a notification of an order from his store, he updates our logistics team, after which they come to pick-up the product(s) from him and finally deliver to the customer seamlessly.

Also, in the course of onboarding, we realized that limiting the players involved to only Agro-Dealers situated in Niger state was inimical to the project’s overall success and undermining Konga’s capacity and coverage to deliver across the country. We also got interesting recommendations from dealers and immediately decided to expand our reach to involve Agro-Dealers from other parts of Nigeria which include; Kaduna, Kano, Lagos, Abuja.

This journey led to targeting and reaching out to the big players in the industry like Jubaili Agrotec Ltd, Indorama Fertilizer, Harvestfield Industries Ltd, and more to come on board. While some have shown interest, administrative bottlenecks have slowed the response time of some big players. For instance, for Indorama Fertilizer, government policies on certain chemical components contained in their fertilizer products that can also be used in manufacturing explosives prohibit the freedom to market such products online.

Awareness Campaign

Due to all these hitches delaying us from going live, we launched the awareness campaign later than we had hoped.

The Agricultural campaign went live in October on Konga.com with agricultural products becoming accessible online.

Following this launch, we deployed a radio jingle in Hausa language ( the predominant language used in Niger) across the frequently listened to stations in the state to promote the newly launched initiative on konga.com

Additionally, we also deployed an SMS push directly to indigenes in Niger state with an affinity for agriculture, as well as targeted ads on Google display network and Facebook to some crop-producing states in Northern Nigeria.

We have also commenced engagements with tech-savvy youths in agricultural communities to become Konga affiliates, who would create awareness and promote the agricultural input category while they also get rewarded.

Progress Made So far

We can gladly say that the reception of this new initiative has been quite commendable. We successfully onboarded twelve (12) Agro-Dealers so far with a spread across five states in Nigeria; Niger, Abuja, Kaduna, Lagos, and Kano. We made available POD (payment on delivery) and POC (pay on collection) to northern regions across the country.

To emphasize Konga’s zero-tolerance to having unauthentic products on the platform, agro-dealers/suppliers are informed of our position and sanctions on this in the onboarding document shared. Restricted and prohibited products by The National Agency of Food and Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC), has been shared with some of the agro-dealers for them to be informed before product uploads.

Till the time of this publication, we have received about thirty-six (36) orders for different agricultural inputs and have observed that the most preferred method of payment by the customers is POD. We have delivered orders beyond our expectations to states across Nigeria like; Adamawa, Kebbi, Akwa Ibom, Portharcourt, Enugu, Delta, and so on. This has shown that there are farmers and individuals who actually would appreciate easy accessibility to agricultural products. From the review of our data so far, we have also recorded some repeat buyers which is an indication of progress, and some cross-buying from customers.

As we surveyed and followed up with our customers, we received feedback from our customers who would like to have some more Agro input assortments, and we hope to make this available in due course.

It is worthy to note that throughout the process we have built amazing relationships with the agro-dealers/suppliers and foresee more to come.

Future of Tech in the Agricultural Sector

We envisage that key players in the Agricultural Sector will fully utilize e-commerce, irrespective of the existing challenges, especially amid the global pandemic crisis. We believe that leveraging technology to the full advantage of all parties involved in the Agricultural sector would lead to the inclusion of small-scale farmers into the formal economy. We believe that agro-dealers have been able to reach other farmers across the country which usually would not be the case, while farmers have access to agricultural input conveniently. Agro dealers are also able to generate more income for themselves.

Importantly, Konga will continue to develop and innovate more tech applications that are user friendly and defy complex technicalities, to offer an acceptable outcome that bridges the digital literacy gap, We would also continuously grow the agricultural category to meet the needs of existing customers and the new ones to come by acquiring and supporting more agro-dealers and suppliers while we also keep promoting the products.

This post was co-authored by Laraba Alabi and Dudu Bakam