With Bumpa’s recent integration with Meta to make selling on Instagram and Facebook easier for business owners on its platform, conversational commerce (c-com) in Africa is set to boom as consumers are increasingly relying on messaging apps for all forms of communication, including personal, business, and commerce.
“The growth of mobile internet usage and social media usage has accelerated in Africa, especially in Sub-saharan Africa over the past decade. Particularly for commerce, retailers have adopted social media channels significantly as a means of showcasing their business for growth.
“This adoption only gets wider and richer as Meta and other social media giants continue to build products and features to facilitate rich commerce activities for its users and Africa will not be left behind,” Kelvin Umechukwu, CEO Bumpa, said.
Founded by Kelvin Umechukwu and Adetunji Opayele in February 2021, Bumpa is a digital commerce platform for African sellers, and creating solutions for business across the continent. According to the company, the integration is coming on the tail of their aim to reach one million business owners across Africa who are using Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp to sell their products.
Bumpa announced that it raised a pre-seed round of $200,000 in September 2021 to continue to provide solutions for business owners with the Bumpa app that gives them a business website, helps them send invoices and receipts to customers, record sales and expenses, receive business financial report, record customer details as well as engage customers.
The founders noted that on Instagram alone, there are a billion users and 200 million business accounts globally. With more than 10 million Instagram users in Nigeria and 70 percent of those users looking at Instagram to make their next purchase, this integration will make sales on social media easier for its users.
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“We have come to see that increasingly, consumers are using chat to find and select products and services and to complete the payment process, all without having to call, email, or even visit a brand’s website. Everything is happening within the messaging app. C-com can make your business establish a new sales channel with higher conversion, higher retention, and more personalized customer relationships,” Umechukwu said.
C-com is when people and brands connect through chat with the intent to drive the purchase of goods or services. Bumpa says C-com in Africa is fast surpassing e-commerce because it works on any smartphone, it requires little internet data, it is fast, it is personalized, and it provides clarity (trust).
According to a report on marketing and sales statistics, 85 percent of consumers would like to message brands while 75 percent of people would be more likely to purchase if they could get answers over messaging. The report also shows that there’s over 60 percent Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) for customers who chat with businesses compared to those who don’t.
“On Bumpa, 40 percent of transactions recorded in our merchant stores are initiated from social media channels, specifically Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. And according to Meta, 70 percent of users look to Instagram before making their next purchase.
“The largest potential for c-com is where Bumpa has the highest knowledge-usage gap. C-com is growing twice as fast as e-commerce and Bumpa has identified and collaborated with the right partners like Meta to deploy the tools business owners need to grow their businesses successfully,” Umechukwu said.
The company says the integration will allow instant messaging, Bumpa business owners that connect their Bumpa app to their Facebook or Instagram account will be able to receive both Facebook and Instagram DMs directly on Bumpa and respond without leaving the Bumpa app.
Seamless customer service, the integration comes with Quick Action buttons in their DMs that make it easy for them to share and sell products, record customer details, and record sales from Instagram and Facebook, without leaving the Bumpa app.
Optimizing their Instagram for sales, with the integration, a business owner’s Instagram account becomes specially optimized with a Shop Now button that takes visitors or customers directly to their Bumpa website, making their business the primary focus of their social media page.
“With c-commerce, it becomes possible to merge the benefit of offline sales in terms of personalization & proximity with the online sales of variety & immediacy. The best of both worlds, and at Bumpa, we are not building everything, we’re connecting everything a small business owner needs in one place,” Umechukwu said.
