In Lagos, a retailer stares at empty shelves and faces an impatient customer base.
Restocking their store leaves them with one of two choices such as multiple phone calls, endless waits and access to a small selection of products due to limited contacts or a long trip through traffic with cash to pick up goods from their wholesaler.
When the goods finally arrive, they find that the costs have unexpectedly risen, cutting into already thin margins.
To change this narrative, RedCloud Technologies, a global tech firm, is introducing innovative ideas to eliminate the barriers to fair and profitable trade, with the goal of transforming how consumer goods are traded across the world’s fastest-growing markets with their proprietary intelligent open commerce platform.
“Our vision for open commerce is to enable trade anywhere through the next evolution of commerce. With Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are driving a new kind of B2B commerce experience, bringing badly needed economics to brands, distributors, and retailers everywhere,” Justin Floyd, CEO at RedCloud, said in a statement.
The company supports Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCGs) brands, distributors, and merchants by digitally linking all the stakeholders in the consumer goods industry and providing the tools they need to drive economic growth.
“Achieving half a billion dollars in trading volume in just over a year in a single market is confirmation of the need for a digital transformation that puts an end to unnecessarily high commission charges and transaction fees while providing the digital access that all businesses deserve,” Floyd said.
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The AI-powered firm is addressing one of the biggest challenges affecting FMCG distribution in Nigeria – the lack of end-to-end visibility across the supply chain, which leads to severe inefficiencies, like stockouts at the retailer and overproduction by FMCG brands.
“This level of convenience is a game-changer for local merchants who traditionally rely on a limited set of contacts for their inventory needs and could only access a narrow selection of products but now have a plethora of choices at their fingertips,” Redcloud said.
It added: “Another significant benefit of open commerce is its cost-effectiveness – by removing the trade barriers typically found in the inefficient, traditional distribution model, merchants can participate in an open, competitive marketplace with transparent pricing.”
More than just enabling transactions, the company’s intelligent open commerce platform captures real-time data across the entire supply chain from over 50,000 live data points and leverages artificial intelligence to provide sellers with a detailed high-fidelity view of the market in real-time.
With operations in four emerging markets – Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina, RedCloud also said it has worked with multiple brands and over 500 distributors across Nigeria to digitise its business and provide end-to-end visibility across these three market segments.
“By leveraging RedCloud’s predictive data analytics solution, these businesses can now identify market trends, purchase and ordering patterns across the entire market. This integrated analytics solution offers such precise demand planning that brands can accurately forecast market needs, leading to more effective inventory and procurement planning, ultimately reducing waste and boosting profitability,” the company said.
Within 12 months of operating in the Nigerian FMCG space, RedCloud announced a $500 million trading milestone on their Intelligent Open Commerce Platform, with over 200,000 merchants trading.
“Big tech has failed many of these businesses, and we are here to put that right,” RedCloud said.
