How Konga, Nigeria's Homegrown Commerce Platform, Lifted Online Revenue by 7% and Drove a ~16X ROI with Netcore

Founded in 2012, Konga is one of Nigeria’s leading e-commerce platforms and one of the earliest to shape the country’s shift to digital shopping. Its ecosystem spans marketplace, retail, logistics, payments and corporate commerce, connecting more than 5 million customers with over 200,000 merchants across 1,000+ product categories, with delivery reach into every state in Nigeria.

Industry Context

Nigeria’s e-commerce market has grown into one of Africa’s largest, with Jumia, Konga and Temu together accounting for roughly 54% of gross merchandise value in 2024, according to Mordor Intelligence. The category keeps consolidating around a small set of established, multi-category platforms, even as new, price-led entrants compete for the same shopper’s attention. Payment and logistics infrastructure is maturing alongside it – Konga itself rolled out an upgraded app and website and a Buy Now, Pay Later partnership with Klump in July 2026, expanding how shoppers can pay for what they choose. In a market where a shopper is comparing several platforms before they buy, the harder job is often not bringing someone to the site, but giving them a reason to finish what they started once they’re there.

Despite strong traffic and a growing customer base, that momentum wasn’t translating into value at every stage of the shopper journey:

• High product browsing drop-offs – shoppers viewed products but didn’t add them to cart, weakening the move from consideration to conversion.
• Cart abandonment – items got added, but checkout was often left incomplete, a direct line to lost revenue.
• Low first-purchase activation – new app sign-ups weren’t consistently converting into a first order, capping how much lifetime value each new customer could ever return.
• Fragmented, untimely communication – messaging was inconsistent across channels and often arrived too late to matter, leaving the experience feeling less personal than the platform itself.

Where the existing setup fell short

One thread ran through all four: Konga’s communication wasn’t built to respond to what a shopper had just done. Messages went out on a schedule rather than a trigger, so a shopper who added a phone to their cart and left might hear nothing for days, or hear from Konga on only one channel when another was more likely to catch their attention. That gap – between what a shopper did and how quickly Konga responded to it – is exactly where the four challenges above kept losing ground, and exactly what the journeys we talk about in the next section were built to close.

Netcore worked with Konga to design five journeys, each answering one of the gaps above, each running automatically across whichever channel a shopper was most reachable on at that moment

1. Welcome Series

New app users receive a short sequence of push nudges timed at 15 minutes, 1 day, 12 hours and 2 days after first launch, building familiarity before asking for a first action. Each nudge in the sequence only fires if the previous one went unanswered, so a user who signs up early doesn’t get talked over by the next message in line.

2. Sign-Up to First Purchase

A conversion-focused journey that follows a new sign-up across app push, web push, email and SMS – in that order of reachability – waiting up to an hour for a purchase event before sending the first nudge, then following up a day later on the same channel logic if no order has come through. The creative leans on urgency and simplicity: “your first order is one click away,” paired with a first-deal offer to lower the bar for that first purchase.

3. Product View Recovery

Shoppers who viewed a product but didn’t add it to cart are reminded of exactly what they looked at – not a generic prompt, but the actual item and its price – across app push, web push and email at one-hour and two-day intervals, with the channel order flipping between the two waves so a shopper who missed the first nudge on push sees the second one by email instead.

4. Cart Abandonment Recovery

Shoppers who add an item but don’t check out see that same item again, with its price and a direct link back to their cart, through email, app push and web push at one-hour and three-hour intervals. The messaging adds light urgency – “your cart won’t stay reserved forever” – without pressure tactics, and repeats the item image and price at each touch so the shopper never has to re-find what they were looking at.

5. Winback

Users who uninstall the app move into a dedicated segment and are re-engaged by a single, targeted email two days later, inviting them back with a clear offer rather than a generic reminder.

Even with five journeys live, the impact showed up as a measurable slice of Konga’s online revenue within months of going live. None of it required a different audience – the same shoppers, reached at the moment and on the channel most likely to work.

Beyond the numbers

Consistent messaging across email, app push, web push and SMS, instead of one channel carrying the message alone
Trigger-based sends replacing manual, one-size-fits-all campaigns at each lifecycle stage
A repeatable journey framework the team can extend to new segments without building each one from scratch

Konga’s July 2026 app and website upgrade, alongside its new Buy Now, Pay Later partnership with Klump, points to a platform still investing in how it serves shoppers day to day. The five-journey lifecycle framework built with Netcore gives Konga a foundation it can extend to new segments and moments as that experience evolves, rather than building fresh automation for every future campaign.