In line with promoting the retail sector in Nigeria through technology, tech startup founders, stakeholders and enthusiasts converged in Lagos to chart the way forward for the retail sector in Nigeria .
The six-day Lagos Startup Week (LSW), held July 25-30 in Victoria-Island, is the sixth edition that brought together over 3,000 attendees and 100 speakers in multiple panel discussions, exhibitions, learning and networking.
Adewale Opaleye, Group Founder/CEO, Alerzo, during one of the day four sessions, which focused on “The Future of Consumers and Consumer Commerce (Payment, Retail and Commerce),” noted that the theme of the discussion was very important as it is necessary to encourage retailers to move away from the old way to embrace technology.
Alongside the panelists, he highlighted a number of gaps in the retail industry, which imploring technology, collaborating with different tech startup founders and tapping into their areas of expertise could help. to solve.
“At the end of the day, we all need partners. We need to come together to achieve great things, we need to consolidate what each of us has done really well and deliver fantastic solutions,” Opaleye said.
He highlighted the need for retailers to not shy away from technology, while recounting Alerzo’s progress in solving retail industry issues as he has more than 400 vehicles that he uses. to deliver fast moving goods (FCMG) to customers.
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“Retailers need to move away from old ways of doing business to embrace technology…To solve the logistics problem, we ended up doing something unthinkable by buying a fleet of vehicles and owning our warehouses,” Opaleye said.
He also revealed that the B2B company leverages its geo-mapped coverage areas in software development to help deliver banking solutions to customers.
“We also developed our software. We make deliveries within four hours of ordering because we own all of our vehicles. After a while, we noticed that many of our retailers were going home with money. So we ended up building banking solutions for our merchants,” Opaleye said.
On what influenced the logistics aspect of owning a fleet of vehicles and not working with existing logistics companies, the Alerzo Group CEO made it clear that the technology company wants the best for its customers.
“No one has built efficiency the way we want, so we do four hour delivery versus other players who do it the next day. This is a very important factor for us and as we grow our business , we are looking for partners who hope to realize our vision of offering fast, same-day delivery to all of our retail partners,” he said.
Speaking on what the future holds for the Nigerian retail sector, Celestine Omin, CEO of Klump expressed her hope saying that there is a very bright future for the space.
As a result, he says retailers are waking up to realize that it’s high time for technology to change most of the problems in the industry. “At the end of the day, it makes consumers’ lives very easy because they would have products when they wanted them.”
The roundtable included Alerzo Founder/Group CEO, Adewale Opaleye; Paystack Startup Programs Manager, Nubi Kay; CEO of Klump, Celestine Omin; Temitayo Ajao, CEO of TeamApt, and Kelvin Umechukwu, CEO of BUMPA, as panelists.
