Hicolumn, the ground-breaking e-commerce tech, has made inroad into the online market in Nigeria with unparalleled services and takes advantage of the non-adoption of the traditional commerce model by the existing e-commerce platforms. In this interview, Benjamin Madu chairman of Hicolumn Technologies spoke to KELECHI EWUZIE on the distinctiveness of the company’s e-commerce platform, among other issues. Excerpts:
What informed Hicolumn’s entrant into the e-commerce sector?
Hicolumn entrant into the e-commerce sector started in 2015. It was born out of the need to help the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) retain their businesses and ensure that they are able to stay in business and not lose out due to their size and obvious challenges that make it difficult for them to leverage the internet for online business presence. We brought their physical stores online by making available to them, tools and facilities that will enable them do so. This is very important because, in the new world really, if your business is not online, then you have no business being in business.
What does the e-commerce mobile app entail?
It is a robust system that removes direct physical appearances from traditional commerce, with three different apps, each built for its own users to achieve this. They are the Customer App for buyers; Merchant App for wholesalers, retailers, importers, etc; and the Delivery App for logistics companies, delivery agent, haulage companies, etc.
They are connected to form a system that translates the physical market into virtual market.
With the Hicolumn App, customers can buy from their choice stores, talk to seller to adjust price in their favour, enjoy the advantages of large-scale purchases by virtues of their bargaining capacity, receive direct discount from sellers, negotiate with sellers on when order should be released to the delivery agent, buy goods at anytime from anywhere, maintain cordial relationship with their choice stores, etc.
Sellers, suppliers, importers etc can also sell their products with liberty, can determine prices, engage in market competition as it is in the physical market, talk to their customers, carry out market research to reduce price, increase price or manage price, maintain cordial relationship with all their customers, receive orders and manage customers both day and night, buy from wholesalers, importers, and others. Also, delivery agents, logistic companies, etc. receive loads of orders both day and night.
With the Hicolumn mobile app you can buy from your choice stores anywhere, anytime without physical movements to access those stores. Good thinking makes good product; and Hicolumn e-commerce App is a product of good thinking.
What are the exploitable opportunities you foresee in the e-commerce market that can be harnessed by Hicolumn?
While in high school, market used to be defined as ‘any arrangement that brings buyers and sellers together for the exchange of goods and services.’ Back then, this definition of market used to be confusing as what we knew then were physical markets! However, now leveraging the power of technology, one can realise the appropriateness of such definition of market, as we can see and make use of many different Apps to connect buyers and sellers for exchange of goods and services, virtually, now widely known as e-commerce.
With about 60 million Nigerians now enjoying access to the Internet, the e-market is bound to get bigger, better and even wider. The best part is that Nigeria has a predominantly youthful population with mobile technology capabilities. 60 million Nigerians connected to the Internet represents about 30 percent of Nigeria’s estimated 200 million populations. It has been observed that about 300,000 online orders are made every 24 hours in Nigeria.
Hicolumn Technologies is establishing itself to take advantage of the non-adoption of the traditional commerce model by the existing e-commerce platforms; by helping to ensure that customers’ usual places of shopping are made available to them on Hicolumn (i.e. stores, market etc.), as well as making it possible for customers to choose or change current location from where orders are made and/or delivered.
Besides the enablement of commerce and trade, Hicolumn is about empowerment. We plan to encourage our teeming youths to embrace commerce instead of white-collar jobs. The list of dollar denominated billionaires on Forbes does not include a single person in paid employment!
We want our youths to realise this and we are prepared to help them through our Apps, to exploit business opportunities available in the various business value chains in the country. For instance, we envisage seeing Mile 12 food market in Surulere, Yaba, Victoria Island, Lekki, etc, through online presence managed by smart youths who take off supplies in bulk from the farmers and market women. We are ready to build the capacity of youths in this regard.
Hicolumn is also about increasing the nation’s GDP, reduction of crime, increase in government revenues in terms of taxes and business name registration, as well as increase in standard of living and employment generation. We project to create not less than 100,000 jobs in the first year of Hicolumn Apps’operation that is before the end of 2021.
How do merchants/store owners, delivery agents and customers become active participants on the ground-breaking e-commerce platform?
Hicolumn platform is an end-to-end connected system. If you are a customer who wants to buy daily needs, when you come to Hicolumn you will get what you want and most importantly, from where/whom you want to get it from.
Also, as a store owner, you should have your products available at all times; you do not need to have any delivery facilities, no registration cost and with about 30 minutes to register and activate your products. Once you are on Hicolumn as a delivery agent, you will have an unending delivery requests. All you need to do is to ensure your facilities are ready to execute the orders within 20 minutes after pick-up. It’s a win-win for everyone.
What is the distinctiveness of the Hicolumn e-commerce Tech compared to others?
The distinctiveness of the Hicolumn e-commerce App is that we are cutting over hitherto physical markets, stores, kiosks and shops into one common online market platform, enabling consumers to buy from shops they know and ordinarily would prefer to buy from because they either know the merchants/stores, or the quality of their products, the guarantees they give, the quality of their service or a combination of all of these. The shops will appear on the Hicolumn App the way they look physically, enabling their existing and prospective customers living within their neighbourhood to distinctively recognize them as they see them online.
Imagine the excitement of seeing that ‘Musa’s grocery shop’ at the entrance of your estate online, with all the groceries displayed; and ordering one’s usual groceries as if you were at the shop physically and then getting your order delivered even in your absence.
For the merchants, just imagine the excitement of people living in your neighbourhood seeing your shop online and placing order and paying you online without physically visiting the shop; and you delivering their orders at the touch of a button, cost-free.
Distinctively, Hicolumn will not accept any display of goods on the platform except stores that have physical locations and identifiable owners.
Also, Hicolumn eliminates middleman profit and redundant supply chain iterations, thereby eventually reducing the cost of trade and consequently the cost of the products, which are passed fully to the final consumer.
For instance, the way e-commerce is organised presently, when consumer orders goods, the goods are first transported from the merchant’s shop or warehouse to the e-commerce platform’s warehouse; the merchant therefore, bears a delivery cost. Then the goods are moved from the e-commerce platform’s warehouse to the customer and the customer is charged a delivery cost, so the cost of trade increases as two delivery costs are borne and also warehousing costs. At the end of the day, since no business owner would want to bear any of these costs, the whole costs are passed on to the final consumer.
However, with Hicolumn, the situation is different. It is not playing the role of a middleman and does not have a warehouse! Hicolumn App connects the sellers directly to the buyers and delivery agents, enabling them to engage with each other directly in the process of buying, selling and delivering, and deliveries are made from the sellers directly to the buyers, thereby short-circuiting the process; removing the two-legged delivery system borne by the final consumer.
What are the challenges in the present e-commerce sector and how would Hicolumn overcome them?
The challenges in the present e-commerce space that the Hicolumn App intends to solve are numerous but we will try to mention just three, that customers face and one that merchants face, as follows:
Leveraging on the result of a consumer behaviour survey exercise carried out by one of our professional partners, seven out of every ten consumers that buy goods online are dissatisfied with the quality of goods they receive. The way the goods appear on the online platforms are not the way they are most of the time when they are eventually received by the customers that order them, especially the feel, and product quality.
Hicolumn is eliminating this challenge by ensuring that only shops with physical locations are allowed to display their products on the Hicolumn Apps, as what the customers first see on the Hicolumn platform is a picture of the front of the shop; most of the time these will be merchants/shops that they know. Therefore, just like the physical shop, the shop owner ensures that he/she sells only quality products as their reputation is at stake, since the transaction is pertinently and directly between them and the customers. Hicolumn App is just an enabler. The App also has facilities for the customers to chat and interact with the merchants directly either by phone, SMS or WhatsApp.
Another challenge that exists in the present-day e-commerce space is that of delay in delivery of goods ordered by customers which sometimes takes days.
Hicolumn has come to solve this challenge as the App enables deliveries to be done within 30 minutes by efficient delivery agents, with no cost borne merchants.
For the merchants, Hicolumn App will eliminate the cost of conveying the customers’ orders first to the e-commerce hub, from where the e-commerce company then dispatches the orders to the customers. With Hicolumn, all that the merchants need to do is to notify the Hicolumn delivery partners, once the customer’s order is ready and they would come, pick up the order and deliver to the customer at no cost to the merchant.
In any business partnership, there are always benefits for the parties involved; what will you say may accrue to merchants and stores partnering with Hicolumn?
Stores/Merchants’ benefits include ability to sell more of their products via virtual market; reduction in sales due to social distancing would become history where customers have the chance of connecting to their various stores online; visibility in locations that they were not previously or physically known, thereby boosting sales without need for advertisement; and many will retain their regular customers.
Customers’ benefits include the opportunity to compare prices; ability to find nearby stores; availability of stores of their preference and freedom to contact stores directly through the platform; ability to make purchases by proxy; have a support system that would help in any matter that may arise between them and merchants; easier connection to choose stores anywhere, anytime without fear; and it is indeed shopping made easy.
