April 4, 2019

The changing face of e-commerce goods delivery in Africa and the Middle East

Businesses in Africa and the Middle East (AME) frequently have difficulties in the last-mile delivery of physical merchandise to consumers, especially in rural areas. This is a result of the lack of adequate transportation infrastructure and inaccurate postal addresses. In order to solve these challenges and drive e-commerce, several companies have developed innovative solutions.

E-commerce goods delivery

Many e-commerce players have opted to improve merchandise distribution through self-owned courier companies to leverage their established network. For instance, Souq acquired Wing.ae in 2017 in order to enable same-day and next-day delivery.

Additionally, Wing.ae incorporates geo-location features in order to give an exact location for delivery from the customer’s ordering smartphone, overcoming the challenge of inaccurate postal addresses.

Telecom operators play a valuable, but limited, role for e-commerce businesses in AME by offering delivery support with fleet management solutions and intelligent, Internet of Things/Machine-to-Machine (IoT/M2M), parcel tracking.

For example, Noon.com is an e-commerce business which harnesses these technologies through the services of the logistics company FarEye. FarEye uses IoT and electronic logging devices for vehicle routing and real-time visibility on data.