By CLAIRE MARTIN
The New York Times

Last year, when Tunde Adebayo needed three inflatable bouncy castles for KidzPlay, his event-planning business in Lagos, Nigeria, he turned to an online shopping service called MallforAfrica.

“In Nigeria we’re sometimes skeptical about online businesses,” Mr. Adebayo says. So he tested the service two years ago with an inexpensive purchase, and that transaction went smoothly. Now he says he frequently shops on MallforAfrica. His purchases have included the castles, which his company takes to parties for children to jump around in, and personal items.

“I buy most of my children’s clothing and my own clothing from there,” he says of the service.

Chris and Tope Folayan, two brothers who grew up in Nigeria and attended college in the United States, founded MallforAfrica in 2013. Tope earned an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. After graduating, he returned to Lagos, while Chris remained in the United States.

Their company makes it easier for Nigerians to place online orders for American and British products that are difficult to find in Nigerian stores and that online retailers don’t offer directly to most African consumers because of troublesome customs duties and paperwork, shipping costs and the fear of fraud.

MallforAfrica is part of a growing tech industry in Nigeria that is attracting foreign investors, including venture capital firms like Silicon Valley’s EchoVC Partners and the British private equity and venture capital firm Helios Investment Partners, which invested in MallforAfrica in 2013.

“Tech entrepreneurship in Lagos is emerging and blowing up rapidly,” says Henrietta Onwuegbuzie, academic director for the owner-manager program at Lagos Business School. E-commerce is “one of the most promising sectors,” she says. Nigeria’s two largest e-commerce players are the venture-backed firms Jumia and Konga.com.

As Nigeria’s middle and upper classes have grown, so has the appetite for foreign goods. But few stores sell them, and when they do, the selections are often paltry, Chris Folayan says. “When you go into a store, you might only find three colors of Ralph Lauren Polo shirts in three sizes.”

Items like Pulsar watches and Juicy Couture tracksuits aren’t any easier to come by. Many North American web merchants won’t ship to Nigeria or other African countries. (South Africa is an exception.)

“They get an order coming in from a Nigerian I.P. address and refuse to complete the order,” says Zia Daniell Wigder, who studies the globalization of e-commerce as a vice president and research director for Forrester Research.

Another barrier for American and European retailers is a lack of familiarity with Africa. “It’s just not a region that they’re comfortable with,” Mr. Folayan says. “They’ve never been there and they don’t have a sense of the economy.”

Mr. Folayan says he conceived of a service like MallforAfrica while working as an intern in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s. Whenever he was preparing to return to Nigeria to visit his family and friends, they would send him money to buy American products for them. He stuffed his suitcases with clothing, jewelry and electronics.

Read more: Bringing African Shoppers to the Global Mall

Source: nytimes.com