Popular e-commerce platform Jumia has launched a prepaid subscription service, which is something we have seen with the e-commerce giant Amazon.
The subscription service is aptly named Jumia Prime and sounds similar to Amazon Prime that is fashioned after. It will give users access of upto 20 deliveries a month where you pay either Kshs 1,249 and Kshs 2,259 for either three or a six month subscription respectively.
The subscription service will cover the cost of local deliveries for items bought on Jumia Express, Jumia and Jumia Global. However, international shipping fees will apply on items bought from international vendors.
The subscription plans will be attractive to shoppers who buy bulky items since they do not discriminate on the size of an order. Apparently large items can attract delivery costs of upto Kshs 4,000 for a single parcel that is being delivered to the furthest regions of the country.
Jumia Prime will be available in Nairobi and its environs as of now but it could be released to more locations in the future.
According to their SEC filing, Jumia has over 81,000 active sellers and a total of 4 million active consumers as of December 31st 2018. They revealed this information when they were filing for their IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. However, a damning Citron Research report revealed that Jumia had failed to state in their F-1 filing that 41% of orders were returned, not delivered or cancelled which caused their shares to tumble at the NYSE.
The move to start a new subscription service has the potential to boost revenues for Jumia which is something Jumia needs. They made a loss of €169.7 million (Kshs 19.27 billion) in 2018 so this could be a way for them to break even or turn in a profit.
