I started my e-commerce business in 2016 after attending a conference. To start, I bought some women’s handbags from Balogun market and mobile phones from Computer Village, Ikeja, Lagos.

I was naïve and wanted to do what Jumia and Konga did, so my progress was limited by marketing: my product categories were too generic, and the few orders we received were hard to fulfill. To cut a long story short, the business failed in 2017. I ended up dashing out the remaining stock.

The failure didn’t occur without lessons learned. After thorough market research and expert consultation, we decided to relaunch the business in 2019. This time, we played in a more specific niche. We imported car scanners and started selling. Orders were pouring in as we expected, but we were left with one critical puzzle to solve. Orders were coming from different parts of Nigeria, even when we targeted only Lagos and Abuja, where we had our presence.

To address fulfillment issues, we quickly signed delivery agreements with leading traditional delivery companies in Nigeria, such as GIGL and Zenith Carex. However, after the partnership and years of operating with these delivery companies, our business remained stunted and showed no growth due to the following challenges.

• High rate of customer rejections due to the delay in interstate delivery, which would take 5 days to arrive. Nigerians place orders with emotion, and when deliveries are not made quickly, they lose interest, and you will start getting several excuses. This high rejection rate wasted our shipping, marketing, and human effort costs.
• We suffered stock reconciliation issues as inventory management was done manually. We kept many stock record books and hired bookkeepers to handle stock reconciliations. Even with all our efforts, we lost many items with traditional delivery companies.
• Remittance was an issue. After all the struggle to sell and deliver, the payments were not duly remitted to us, and worst still, we didn’t know when or how much we were to receive as our remittance. Our bookkeepers would follow up on payments because the process for payment from traditional delivery companies was rigorous. Despite the efforts we put in place, we still had to forfeit some payments because we exhausted all avenues to collect them. Painful!
• The traditional delivery companies are not industry-specific, and their offers are not tailored to solve the core e-commerce fulfilment pain points. They practice the true meaning of the popular statement “Jack of all trades and master of none.” We were only pushing them to see if they could help us, but they couldn’t.
• Talking to someone from the company in the form of customer support was a huge issue. Whenever we ran into trouble, communicating it was practically impossible. This also affected our customer satisfaction, as some customers cancelled their orders out of frustration due to a lack of fulfilment support.
• Professionalism was a mess with the traditional delivery companies and their riders. The riders were rude and very unprofessional. They were disrespectful to both us (the seller) and our customers. They didn’t feel concerned because we had already paid the delivery fee, and whether the order was completed or not, they weren’t bothered. They failed to know that in e-commerce, proper communication and feedback are as important as the delivery itself. The riders would frustrate the customer to the point that the customer had no choice but to cancel the order. It was that wild!

With the above problems, there was no way to scale and grow our e-commerce business.

After trying many options – none of which solved the problems – my team and I decided to plant trained distributors in every city and town to help us overcome delivery hurdles with a win-win, profit-sharing model.

To truly achieve this, we built Selligate, a tech-enabled seamless application to manage the distributors, customers, and order deliveries.

To cut a long story short, within three (3) months of launching and using the application, our monthly sales revenue skyrocketed by 280%. We were happy, and our distributors were delighted.

We then discovered that we had just struck a gold mine of human assets that, when utilized, can generate unlimited wealth. You can call this the “Uber” of E-commerce.

Selligate is a result of our passion, dedication, and sleepless nights. It’s why we built it to be unique. Our mission is to make it easy for e-commerce businesses to scale and grow their revenue and profits faster, without the pain of e-commerce order fulfillment, by adopting the hyper-local distribution network model.

I am particularly excited to see that over 1,000 e-commerce businesses now call Selligate home because of its life-changing usefulness. Our first set of merchants is still with us to date!

Nigeria represents one of the most dynamic and fast-growing e-commerce markets in the world. A recent intelligence report projects that e-commerce transactions in Nigeria will exceed $33 billion by 2026, up from $15 billion in 2023—a dramatic growth trajectory that underscores both scale and momentum. Nigeria also commands one of the highest shares of e-commerce activity in the entire Middle East and Africa region.

Within this expanding landscape lies a critical gap: trust, delivery reliability, and pay-on-delivery execution. These are the reasons Selligate will continue to build a superior, technology-driven fulfilment solution to meet future e-commerce growth in Nigeria and across Africa.

I am Siyaka Hussein Obanimoh, the CEO of Selligate Technologies Limited.