Former Jumia Co-founder, Raphael Afaedor Announces His New Venture

Raphael Afaedor, the former co-CEO of JUMIA Nigeria who officially left the Rocket Internet-backed e-commerce company in January 2014, is finally breaking his silence today with the announcement of a new venture.
While his LinkedIn profile still says he’s co-founder and Managing Director of Jumia Nigeria, Afaedor revealed the launch of an online grocery delivery service that wants to bring a great deal of convenience to your life.



According to the Ghanaian entrepreneur in an email announcing the launch that was made available to TechLoy, his latest venture, Supermart “will allow you shop from over 18,000 grocery items that will be delivered to your home or office at a time of your choosing and in as early as 3 hours after your order.”
He also added that he’s co-founded the start-up with his partner, Gbolahan Fagbure, who until three months ago was the Chief Operations Officer at JUMIA Nigeria. According to Fagbure, the service would add a great deal of convenience to the lives of people who prefer not to spend hours driving between various supermarkets, looking for parking at busy supermarkets and waiting on queues to pay for their shopping.
Afaedor, whose latest venture is his third try in Nigerian e-commerce, after QluQlu, a daily deals service and JUMIA says the service was born out of the fact that customers typically go to multiple supermarkets to complete their grocery shopping. He thinks that a service that allows them to easily add items from the multiple stores into one basket and pay once would be a life saver.
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Boasting a time-saving service, Supermart lets users buy grocery items from major multiple supermarkets in Lagos such as Park ‘n’ Shop and Spar and deliveries made within three hours after order, although customers would have to pay N800 (about $5) to a personal shopper to have their orders packaged and delivered to their preferred location.
No doubt, this model could be a real game changer for the online retail space as even the leading e-commerce services such as Jumia and Konga have yet to guarantee next day deliveries, let alone 3-hour delivery time frames. Also, the fact that Supermart’s service is being offered in just about 5 cities (Ikoyi, Victoria Island, Lekki, Victoria Garden City and Marina) in Lagos makes it even more a huge value proposition for customers.
However, I’m skeptical whether Supermart would be able to keep up with its 3-hour delivery time goal when it starts getting large volumes of orders on its site or when it does expand to other cities in Lagos or outside Lagos.