The New Jumia Experience Centre is an Excellent Steal from Amazon’s Playbook

Nigeria’s biggest e-commerce company, Jumia, has been changing the face of online retailing in Nigeria. Now, Jumia is taking its efforts offline too.

The e-commerce giant recently unveiled the Jumia Experience Centre. The Jumia Experience Center is an all-in-one location to get full access to all Jumia offerings. Expectedly, the experience centre is located at the tech-nerve of Lagos, Yaba, at 11B, Commercial Avenue, Yaba.

Jumia Experience Centre Took a Lot from Amazon

The Jumia Experience Centre is a carbon copy of the Amazon Experience Center in the US and India. Amazon’s experience centres are futuristic environments powered by Amazon technologies. For instance, here, customers can ask Alexa (Amazon’s AI) to control the television, lights, thermostat, among many others. These centres are found in different areas in the US and India.

The Jumia experience center is close to Amazon’s in intent. Although it doesn’t possess the futuristic tech of Amazon, Jumia’s experience center is an impressive attempt to make online shopping more accessible to more people.

The experience center will allow customers place orders, pay bills, book flights, among a few others.

One of the most important sides to this offline experience is customers can decide that their items be delivered to the experience center. From here, customers can pick up their orders. This could reduce the cost for both the customers and Jumia accrued due to delivery issues.

Customers can also return items to the experience center or use the services of a personal shopper to place an order.

More Exposure to Other Jumia Offerings

Like the Amazon centres, Jumia Experience Center also allows customers interface with Jumia’s other offerings. And there are quite a lot of them. Jumia Food and Jumia Travel are two very popular ones.

With its location at Yaba, the centre opens for business from Monday to Friday, from 8 am to 8 pm. And on weekends, it opens 9 am and close 5 pm.

As laudable as the feat seems, the Jumia Experience Centre is not exactly groundbreaking. The experience centre appears to be convenient for picking up goods, but it does not hope to fundamentally change the e-commerce experience.

Like the Jumia One app, the experience centre clearly aims at pushing the Jumia brand and its other services to more people. But unlike the Jumia One app, the experience centre is actually useful to people.