UPDATE: Konga reinstated the Pay on Delivery model 8 months later, on the 1st of August, 2018.
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.
There are also speculations that founding ex-CEO Sim Shagaya may be returning to his role, from which stepped down almost 2 years ago.
Current Konga CEO, Shola Adekoya himself 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, in seeming retaliation drew first blood in April, by suspending PoD almost a year behind schedule. Soon enough, Jumia itself followed suit, albeit with a partial implementation. With three of the major eCommerce platforms on board, this might be the beginning of the end for PoD.
Beyond the layoffs and elimination of PoD, Konga will also be ending it warehousing service for merchants.
