Tunde Kehinde and Ercin Eksin are the Founders and Managing Directors of African Courier Express, ACE. The duo were among the pioneers of e-commerce in Nigeria having been co-founders of Nigeria’s now largest online retailer, Jumia.com in a garage in Lagos, June, 2012. Jumia has since grown to become one of the biggest online retail brands in the country. In this interview, Kehinde and Eksin shared with JONAH NWOKPOKU how their experience building Nigeria’s biggest online brand played a significant role in inspiring and creating ACE, a solution that has revolutionised the Nigerian logistics industry. Excerpts

What is ACE?

•Tunde Kehinde

ACE is an acronym for African Courier Express. It is Nigeria’s largest direct to consumer delivery network. We help retailers, banks, insurance companies and other businesses deliver goods directly to consumers all over Nigeria. The service also allows users to track packages real time as well as making provisions for payment collection at points of delivery.

Can you take me through the ACE’s process of delivery?

Tunde: Talking about the process, there are several ways one can leverage the platform. One is that our client manager will work with you to understand how your business works. And then they will help you to designate, to determine if you would like us to pick up from you or you would like to drop off for us to pick and deliver. If you prefer to drop off, once you get the items to our hub, we then initiate the tracking process so that you will get a tracking link and then one of our riders will start your package along the delivery route.

What that means is that within Lagos, we are delivering the next day for items received from clients and across the country within three days. And throughout the process, you will get status updates from us. And if you like, we can collect a payment for you at the point of delivery, reconcile it and remit back to you in a very neat format that you can use for your reporting purposes.

What is your scope of operation? Do you only deal with online retailers or both?

Ercin: We deal with individuals and businesses that need to move goods from one place to another. And these clients are free to ship anything across Nigeria.

What inspired you into this line of business and what particular new solutions are you bringing to the table?

Tunde: We used to run Jumia Nigeria and we grew that brand from just five employees to about a few thousands by the time we left. And the greatest challenge we saw was, how do we get these items across this country in a deterministic fashion, so that you can tell your customer that his ‘order X’ is coming within one or two days? That was a great challenge and we tried to build our own delivery network in-house but even that was not enough to meet the demands.

And we said: look, why not create a platform where the everyday Small and Medium Businesses or individuals can ship what they want, receive payment at point of delivery and track packages real time in a way that delights the customer. And then we launched the ACE about a year and half ago and have since then shipped to over 200, 000 customers. We have presence in five cities across the country and we have collected payments for everyone, from small merchants selling in big marketplaces to offline giant retailers like Chicken Republic.

There are several new innovations we have brought to logistics in Nigeria. First, we have introduced our own delivery proprietary technology into the market, customised for the Nigerian consumer. What that means is that you can now tell at every point in the delivery process where your package starts. This is something that no one else is doing. Our riders have their own mobile application at the point of delivery when they update our system that an item has been delivered. We get a notification and our business merchant gets an alert and then the end customers can reconfirm that they received their package.

•Ercin Eksin

At the same time, we are now the biggest direct to consumer payment collector for retail in this market. So what we allow our businesses to do is ship a package, receive a payment either through a POS or in cash and get it to our merchant in a timely fashion. So what we are offering is next day delivery, pay on delivery in a world class fashion and real time technology that has not been brought to Nigeria before.

Funding is a great challenge for most e-commerce start-ups, how did you get funding to embark on capital intensive business like logistics?

Ercin: It is true that in Nigeria there have not been exits in the start-up space in a large scale. So it’s true that people in general are sceptical to invest in start-ups. But what is also true is that if you have the right experience and team, including the right approach to a problem, there will be people willing to invest in your business. That was how we got our funding. This is because we built Jumia to successful level and people believed in us that we could make logistics successful as well.

Tunde: We have been fortunate to have investors from day one. One of our largest investors now is Interswitch. If you have a world class product, a world class team, it is always very likely that you will get investors easily looking to help you create something amazing. What we are looking to create is the largest delivery network across Africa, where anyone, Nigerian, or anyone from West or East Africa can ship what they want and when they want it affordably while tracking it real time.

Given your experience in the last two years in the logistics space, how would you assess the Nigerian logistics industry?

Ercin: E-commerce has become quite wide with the introduction of couple of players like Jumia and Konga style. The reason being that there is quite a need in Nigeria, because if you look at Lagos where you have about 17 million people, there are only three international quality shopping malls. And if you go outside of Lagos, the availability of goods even decreases further. Therefore, e-commerce has become a good value proposition in Nigeria but the fact is the biggest challenge was always getting the goods from the warehouse to the end consumer.

There were big players but their processes were not customised to the needs of the consumer and now there are small players but do not have the IT infrastructure and management structure in place to scale. So that was how ACE came to fill that gap because we solved the challenge in Jumia and we realised that we could also do that to help other players in e-commerce to help them scale.